Dan Douglass on direct

Dan Douglass

Tuesday 20th January, a day we will never see again. The inauguration of America’s first black president. Much has been said of Obama’s soaring rhetoric, the way he can articulate a big idea through the power of oratory. We hear influences old and new in his phrases – those of both Cicero and his speechwriter, 27 year old David Favreau – perfectly attuned to his preachifying cadences and vibrating baritone. Favreau – the youngest chief speechwriter on record at The Whitehouse - could just as well be a DM agency copywriter. Obama demands high levels of response from his campaign and he's turned to Favreau as his wordsmith. No pressure there, then. For me, no one has really provided an adequate analysis of Favreau's craft. There has been no adequate dissection of the oratory – no adequate explanation of what makes Obamaspeak so persuasive technically. Beyond the audacity of hope - belief and the truth at the heart of the man - what makes it such compelling language? That is until Saturday's FT. Here, Sam Leith has delivered what should be a text-book lesson about Obamaspeak for all copywriters, more useful and pitch perfect than any text by Ogilvy, Bernbach or Abbot. So, for those who didn't see the piece, I’ve attempted to fillet his article below. Why are Obama’s rhetorical flourishes worth examining when it comes to the copywriter’s craft? Because, like the DM copywriter,Obama has only words to persuade his audience to change their behaviour - to take personal and collective responsibility for change. He has to persuade the people that governments alone cannot solve America’s problems. “If we’re waiting for someone else to do something, it never gets done”. This call-to-action has shape and substance in Obama’s urging his supporters to engage in a day of community service. It’s like urging your audience to sign a petition, go online pick up the phone, register, sign-up, recommend a friend, trade up, then go out and do your marketing for you - all at once and on a grand scale. That’s a big audience and it’s a big ask. And, if words can force behavioural change, they have to be the right ones. Leith makes the point that what Obama is doing is taking ground-rules from Aristotle four centuries before the birth of Christ. Broken down into its component parts, it involves ‘Ethos’, ‘Logos’ and ‘Pathos’. ‘Ethos’ is that part of rhetoric that establishes the speaker’s bona fides, ‘Logos’ the actual argument. And ‘pathos’ the emotional manipulation of the audience. Then there’s the tricolon – three terms in ascending order such as “I came, I saw, I conquered”. And to add another layer to the tricolon, balanced doubles known in formal rhetoric as syntheton (“men and women”, “colour and creed”, “ young and old” and so forth). Leith quotes classic tricolon balanced doubles in Obama’s speech at the Victory column in Berlin in front of 100,000 people. “As we speak, cars in Boston and factories in Beijing are melting the ice-caps in the Arctic, shrinking coastlines in the Atlantic, and bringing drought to farms from Kansas to Kenya”. A double (“Boston and Beijing”) leading to a tricolon whose third term is itself doubled up, the whole mixture thick with alliteration. “This is very far from informal or direct or off-the-cuff speech. It is marvellously and intentionally musical… the mode and shape of address are vital to its persuasive force” Obama’s winning slogan, “Yes, we can” benefits from its three stressed syllables. It is a metrical object called a molossus – thump, thump, thump. It is also an anapaest (diddy dum). Finally, Leith picks up on repetition, or what is called ‘anaphora’, where a phrase is repeated at the beginning of successive lines. His speech at the Iowa caucus on January 3rd 2008 opened: ”You know, they said this time would never come. They said that our sights were set too high. They said this country was too divided, too disillusioned to ever come together around a common purpose”. Rolling repetitions are also the stuff of the Declaration of Independence. – Obama reaches back to the Founding Fathers in the way his phrases are scanned. His language is littered, - not just for euphony but to give the impression of striving for the right word, the exact idea – with parallels, mock hesitations, qualifications. As we have seen, he seldom uses one word when a balanced pair will do. Like all the best orators, he at times affects to mistrust rhetoric, remembering perhaps the points in his dorm-room debates as a student. In Dreams from My Father, he points out the dangers in stopping thinking and slipping into cant. To this end, he borrows one of Lincoln’s most effective rhetorical tricks – the sudden drop in register to plain style – the folksiness of an injunction on the night of the New Hampshire Primary “to disagree without being disagreeable” being a prime example. David Favreau knows all this. It’s now intuitive. But it still takes hard work and painstaking research to get to a form of words that dovetail with Obama’s natural rhythms of speech To get to today’s inaugural address, David Favreau spent weeks researching, interviewed historians and speech writers, studied periods of crisis and listened to past inaugural orations. When ready he took up residence in Starbucks in Washington and wrote the first draft. Just as Favreau has a responsibility to his audience and the Obama brand, as much as he has a responsibility to sound out every phrase for its resonance, so writers have a responsibility to their audiences and their brands. And creative’s should never underestimate the power of rhetorical devices to help them. This afternoon at 5 pm, the agency will gather to watch Obama’s inaugural address. I for one will be tuned in to the style as much as the substance. Leith refers to TS Eliot who once said the meaning of a poem is merely something the poet uses to distract the reader while the poem does its work on him. His rhetoric is not only serving to restore a nation's belief in itself and renewing hope of a better future for billions worldwide - it is in its own way reinforcing our faith in the power of words to transform behaviour.