editorlisa
Hi! I'm Lisa. I work in TV and film as writer, producer & editor. This is my blog about the work I do and the news, trends and technologies that touch it. With the occasional totally unrelated bits thrown in.
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“Since 1913, the length of the average presidential sentence has fallen from 35 words to 22. Between Nixon and the second Bush, the average presidential sound bite shrank from 42 seconds to 7. Today’s State of the Unions inspire roughly 30 seconds of applause for every 60 seconds of speech. Although it’s tempting to blame the sorry state of things on the current malapropist-in-chief, Bush is only the latest flower (though, obviously, a particularly striking one) on a very deep weed. Our most brilliant presidents, Lim says, often work hard to seem publicly dumb in order to avoid the stain of elitism—amazingly, Bill Clinton’s total rhetorical output checks in at a lower reading level than Bush’s. Clinton’s former speechwriters told Lim that their image-conscious boss always demanded that his speeches be ‘more talky’; today, he’s widely remembered as a brilliant speaker who never gave a memorable speech.”
NEW YORK Magazine, on the dumbing-down of speechifying in modern American politics, in an article on the challenge Obama faces in tuning his August DNC oration to juuuust the right note to appeal to both his base of “excitable college-educated liberals” and the people “who are suspicious of all his pretty speeches.”
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