Many people, in response to an article I wrote on Bnet.com, note a significant difference in the quality of President Obama’s speech between those occasions when he uses a teleprompter and those when he speaks extemporaneously. They imply that his oratorical gifts are actually not as great as they seem because when he speaks without a teleprompter he says “er and uhm” like the average oratorical duffer, and often pauses awkwardly once he starts a sentence, as he re-thinks how to arrange the thought into words that will not play against him.

Barbara Tuchman, the great American historian, suspected that teleprompters would bring down our democracy. She said, in an interview with Bill Moyers, that the devices were “the most devastating tool that technology’s invented…” Our public men “don’t speak spontaneously. You don’t hear them meet a situation out of their own minds. They read this thing that’s going along there in front of them. Words that have been created for them by PR men or by advertisers or whatever. And this is not the real man that we see. And it allows an inadequate, minor individual to appear to be a statesman, because he’s got very good speechwriters. Mr. Reagan. Boy. And to read the stuff off, because he reads it very well. He’s an actor, I guess, a trained actor. … you never know what he’s reading. Nor do you really know this with any of them. They learn it very fast…the teleprompter–is a really, in my opinion, it’s a terrible tool, because what we have is an artificial result.”

Then Bill Moyers says, “And yet George Washington had Alexander Hamilton as a speechwriter (and by the way, Lincoln had William Seward–SW). The Farewell Address, his final major statement as he exited the Presidency, was largely penned by Alexander Hamilton. Is there a correlation?”

And Tuchman says, “No, because the teleprompter show the person in a situation which is not real, and which is phony, and which is deceptive. The thing is, you see, that we’re a public that is brought up on deception, through advertising. From the moment we are children, we learn that some kind of cereal is going to make us strong and win races and one thing and another, and the next thing you know , if you use a particular kind of toothpaste, you’re going to marry Gary Cooper, or at least have a glamorous romance somewhere; all that is deception.”

She raises some questions.
1. Are teleprompters a form of deception?
2. What’s the difference between a teleprompter and a piece of paper with the speech written on it?
3. Do we want our Presidents to speak without benefit of speech writers, teleprompters, or written notes?
4. How important is it that our President be a good “talker”–meaning a strong advocate for his ideas and for our country.
5. What are the skills, attributes, and behaviors of a good talker?

These are questions that are worth answering well.