Lynn Espinoza is a broadcast news veteran with more than a decade of media, presentation and executive coaching experience. She has developed personal coaching sessions for Fortune 100 C-level executives, corporate communicators of all kinds, doctors, lawyers and leaders in non-profit.
Now the Fun Starts
Posted on April 23, 2008. Filed under: Latest News
So Pennsylvanians did their thing. Now the real fun starts. Fun, that is, if you make a living delivering speeches, watching speeches and coaching others who need to speak well to do well. That’s what I do. And it’s why this time in the political cycle is more fun for me than a weekend at the Vegas roulette wheel with unlimited cash. It’s chancey. It’s dramatic. It’s limitless.While people try to sort out whether Hillary won by 10%, 9% or 8.6%, I want to move on to something of which I’m 100% sure: Tone means everything from here on out.
Much research indicates that what one says is far less important than how one looks and sounds when saying it. We’ve seen plenty of evidence of this so far. Both candidate are saying roughly the same thing when it comes to what matters: Health care, wars, economy. But how they say it is quite different. It’s all about tone. Obama’s hopeful tone was most effective early on. Clinton’s competent tone resonated later. Recently, both have displayed their p**sed-off tone, and that hasn’t work too well for either.
What’s a candidate to do? Pundits today from the WSJ to NBC to Fox news say Obama needs to go back to hope, and then insert a tone of more competence. Hillary needs to go back to competence and insert a tone of more hope.
If both candidates follow this advice, both will have similar policies - articulated with a similar balance of tone; hope and competence. Now THAT will make for a compelling choice, don’t you think?
One Response to “Now the Fun Starts”
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Good points all, Lynn.
Yesterday, on-air (KOMO 1000 Newsradio)– we interviewed veteran ABC White House Reporter Anne Compton. When I asked her if this could go all the way to a brokered convention she said, “Doesn’t it feel like we’re right in the middle of a crazy thriller and no one knows the ending?”
Every little “tone” nuance is critical at this point, this late in the game.