Excerpts from the February 7, 2006 New York Times coverage of the Coretta Scott King funeral :
Of the four presidents, Mr. Clinton was the obvious favorite of the crowd. A huge cheer went up as he reached the open area near Mrs. King’s coffin, and the crowd gave him a thunderous standing ovation when he approached the microphone with his wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.
He (Clinton) delivered the longest speech of the four presidents, apparently without notes. After former President George Bush lost some of his prepared remarks, he told the crowd, “It may be your lucky day, I’ve lost a page.” As they cheered, cameras caught the current President Bush laughing heartily in the background.
We can debate all day on whether there is a left-wing or a right-wing bias in the mainstream media (just kidding, please don’t send me your opinions on this tiresome issue), but one thing is beyond debate: the news media has a definite bias in favor of speakers who don’t read speeches and a pronounced bias against speakers who work from fully prepared texts.
The clear-cut implication of this article is that Bill Clinton is loved by the audience, in part, because he comes across as sincere and likeable because he can simply talk from the heart. Former President George Bush, on the other hand, is out of his element and awkward, as demonstrated by his losing a page of his speech. Granted, the
New York Times still showed Bush in a positive light — he was able to make fun of himself. Still, one former president was able to communicate messages of profound emotional importance, while another former President was cast as an amiable nerd who has to be content with making fun of his own failings as a communicator.
Which message would you rather convey?
Note that the New York Times wrote that Clinton spoke “apparently without notes.” As I teach all of my clients, it is very easy to use notes while speaking in a way that is undetectable to an audience, as long as you keep your notes to one page and never have to pick it up.
Bush blundered on several accounts:
1. He should have personally double checked his speech right before going on to make sure every page was in order.
2. He should have condensed his notes to a single sheet of paper so as to avoid the problem of missing or mixed up pages.
3. He should have been familiar enough with the messages he wanted to convey at the funeral so that he could have adlibbed though the missing page without ever calling attention to his missing page.
Former President Bush does not have a reputation as a vain, self-aggrandizing politician, but in this case, he took the spotlight off of the dead and the mourning process and put it on himself. And that’s the last thing you want to do if you have been invited to speak at a funeral.
