No oratory, please

When John Kerry arrives at the podium to accept the Democratic nomination for president Thursday evening, expectations for his speech ought to be great. The culminating address of the convention will be given by a man known for many years as an accomplished orator.

This may sound strange to those accustomed to the mockery this election season of Kerry's stiffness, his vagueness, his tendency toward highly elaborated statements that sometimes make it hard to grasp just where he stands. But it's not all Kerry's fault. He was born a century too late, into an era when highly elaborated statements fall on deaf ears.

The problem is, he was trained too well in an obsolescent tradition. He studied oratory and won prizes for it in prep school and college, at St. Paul's School and Yale. When he graduated from Yale, he gave the class oration. As if that's not enough, he was a champion debater too.

But his very skill in oratory may be his undoing, because in the political arena, the era of oratory is over. We live in the moment of the sound bite.

Nowadays, college oratory is to political oratory as college wrestling is to pro wrestling. The former requires skill in developing an argument and marshalling evidence to support a reasoned conclusion. The latter requires keeping an audience captivated moment by moment, regardless of what comes before or after.

So a political speech nowadays can't risk patiently developing a point. To a 21st-century temperament, even Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, all 200-plus words of it, takes too long to get from "Four score and seven" to "government of the people, by the people, for the people." It has some of the most memorable phrases in American history, but the speech itself is a subtle argument. Step by step, Lincoln connects the sacrifice of the soldiers to the preservation of the Union and then connects that to the preservation of the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence. You can't reduce it to a sound bite.

No, to catch our attention a modern speech simply has to zing with one-liners, like John F. Kennedy's great inaugural address of 1961. Remember? "Not a victory of party but a celebration of freedom," "let the word go forth," "let every nation know," "If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich," "So let us begin anew," "Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate," "And so, my fellow Americans: Ask not. . . ."

Each of Kennedy's ringing declarations can stand by itself, much more than anything in Lincoln's point-to-point reasoning. Old-fashioned orators constructed arguments; modern presidents construct potential quotations, and Kennedy's were among the best and brightest.

Modern politics rewards politicians who burnish their sound bites. Take Ronald Reagan, for another example. We remember him not for complete speeches but for pithy remarks within them: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall," "the aggressive impulses of an evil empire," "There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers."

So where does this leave Kerry? Worse off, if the Yale class orator of 1966 should be tempted to appeal to his audience the old-fashioned way. If Kerry and his advisers want anyone to pay attention, he will have to resist the temptation to be deliberate, to carefully make his case. Instead, he needs to focus on salting his speech with the fresh, memorable, quotable sound bites that have so far been in short supply in his campaign.

Kerry has told reporters that he's drafting the speech himself, though he has had help from speechwriters. But maybe Kerry should borrow writers from "Saturday Night Live." They came up with "strategery" for George W. Bush (his foreign policy advisers later dubbed themselves the "Strategery Group") and "girlie man" for Arnold Schwarzenegger, who recently used the phrase to bash his Democratic opponents in the California Legislature. Perhaps they could give Kerry some lines we'd remember.

Allan Metcalf is author of "Presidential Voices: Speaking Styles from George Washington to George W. Bush," published this month by Houghton Mifflin. He is a professor of English at MacMurray College in Illinois and executive secretary of the American Dialect Society. Jan Freeman is on vacation.