A Platoon of Coaches for McCain

Of all the contrasts between the two presidential candidates--political philosophy, age, race--the most glaring, as we saw this week, may be rhetorical.

Barack Obama is a masterful public speaker. John McCain, to put it kindly, is not.

Describing him as "a guy who has never really learned how to read a teleprompter," Gail Collins parses McCain's Tuesday night performance:

“'I have a few years on my opponent, so I am surprised that a young man has bought into so many failed ideas,'” McCain said. Pause. Smile. McCain has only a couple of versions of smile. And for speeches, he tends to employ a kind of scary, humorless teeth-baring.

“'He doesn’t trust us to make decisions for ourselves and wants the government to make them for us. And that’s not change we can believe in.' Pause. Smile. It was Pavlovian, really, as if some handler had run McCain through his paces over and over, administering an electric shock each time he ended a sentence without revealing his dental work."

That is certainly why McCain's campaign has challenged Obama to appear with him at town-hall meetings, a venue in which their man can use the kind of ease and charm he was been displaying for years on the Daily Show in interviews with Jon Stewart. But even if Obama accepts, that won't, to use a hallowed Republican phrase, be a cakewalk either.

Half a century ago, when presidents started appearing on TV, Dwight Eisenhower's campaign hired the movie actor-director Robert Montgomery to coach the former General into acting like good old friendly relaxed Ike. It worked.

Since then, Washington has been overrun by media trainers to teach politicians how to maintain eye contact, use the right gestures and fake looking natural. The McCain people could use a platoon of them.

Obama's Words and Music

The Clinton campaign and its candidate are immune to irony. In attacking Barack Obama for "plagiarism" in using memorable phrases cited by Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick as he too defended himself against charges of excessive rhetorical brilliance, Clinton campaign adviser Howard Wolfson is missing the point in spectacular fashion.

Even after Gov. Patrick's testimony that he and Obama often exchange ideas, Wolfson insists "that the public has an expectation that Sen. Obama's words are his own."

But Wolfson's gotcha may boomerang. It isn't Obama's phrases that have carried him past Hillary Clinton in the Democratic race but the attitude and worldview they convey. It isn't Obama's words that count, it's the music.

By fastening attention on the literal, Clinton's surrogate is exhibiting exactly the kind of literal thinking that has damaged her campaign from the start. In the Clinton view, the campaign is a test, and the candidate with the most answers should win.

But it isn't. Voters want a sense of the candidate's heart, mind and spirit, the kind of test Obama is winning by making his feelings and thought processes available rather than hiding behind rote phrases like "ready from Day One" and "35 years of delivering change."

If anything, Obama is far from a talented phrase-maker. His speeches depend more on rhythms of openness and reaching out that seem to be connecting with voters of all demographics.

After all these years of Bush's mangling the English language and inverting the meaning of words, a little literacy is certainly welcome. But if Clinton and her crew keep harping on getting the words right, they will be missing the music.