February 14, 2008
You Gotta Believe
I got talking with a friend yesterday about Barack Obama's speaking style and the contrast on primary nights between his speeches and those of Hillary Clinton or John McCain, who despite his best efforts always looks like he's giving a speech with his teeth gritted.
Four years ago, I was lucky enough to be on the floor of the FleetCenter in Boston to watch his keynote to the Democratic National Convention and as part of my research for my big article on Barack Obama over a year ago, I watched him speak many times, and even more since then. What's been great about seeing him speak so many times is the chance to watch people react to him for the first time.
Truly great speakers offer a chance to believe—it's the same whether you're talking about pulpit preachers, televangelists, politicians, Oprah or Dr. Phil. The interaction between the crowd and the speaker is also key—you need the interplay between both to really create the unique environment that allows for just that second of believing.
On the Dean campaign, one of Joe Trippi's favorite sayings was the old baseball slogan, "You Gotta Believe." It appeared at many of our rallies and one of the iconic images from the campaign is Trippi with a "You Gotta Believe" sign thrust high over his head—for a moment even Trippi believed. I remember the highlight of the campaign for me was the final rally of the Sleepless Summer Tour in summer 2003 in Bryant Park, New York, where we packed over 10,000 people into the park. As night fell and Dean took the stage, we reached the million-dollar online fundraising goal for the trip and the crowd went wild. Governor Dean's speech that night was basically the same he had given a thousand times at that moment but the play between his energy, the setting, and the crowd was magical. I never believed more in that campaign than I did at that exact moment.
What Obama does so well is offer that moment of belief—that, dare we say, hope—to crowds as he speaks. For just the moment of the speech, you want to believe everything he says—that the world he describes is one that we can achieve.
As George Packer wrote in the New Yorker recently: "Obama spoke for only twenty-five minutes and took no questions; he had figured out how to leave an audience at the peak of its emotion, craving more. As he was ending, I walked outside and found five hundred people standing on the sidewalk and the front steps of the opera house, listening to his last words in silence, as if news of victory in the Pacific were coming over the loudspeakers. Within minutes, I couldn’t recall a single thing that he had said, and the speech dissolved into pure feeling, which stayed with me for days."
If Hillary or McCain wants to beat Obama, they need to get better at offering that magical moment of hope. Hillary offers a good story, you believe that she can make change, but by and large she's too practical to offer too much hope. She, as Packer says, represents the art of what's actually possible.
Hope, that moment of believing, is perhaps the gift of the young and the naive, but when you look back over the great speakers of American life, like JFK and Martin Luther King, Jr., few things aren't possible when you offer inspiration and energy at the level they did. The question for this election: Can enough people believe for long enough to get Barack where he needs to be?
