As you all know from the great Frank Luntz, it’s not what you say …

… it’s what they hear!

And much of what they ‘hear’ comes from what they ‘see’ and ‘feel’.

Thus the best speaker in the world will be undone if the audience see and remember him/her as the one who scratched his/her bottom absent-mindedly during the speech. Or the one who knocked over the glass of water. Or the one who forgot his/her glasses.

Above all, people sense your message very differently from what you might intend it to be.

So emphasising a point repeatedly may come across as ‘trying too hard’, or even some sort of ill-suppressed desperation.

Too many jokes at a supposedly serious event start to get unfunny – what’s s/he avoiding?

Attempted soaring oratory makes no sense for most people. As Peggy Noonan has famously said, "Your style should never be taller than you are".

All of which is a roundabout way of linking to this sharp analysis at NRO by Rob Long of President Obama’s pronouncements on the oil leak problem.

He takes a look at speeches by President George H Bush and President Obama from the refreshing viewpoint of someone who has done some basic psychology at college:

Psychiatrists love this little trick, because it makes their work so incredibly easy. You just wait for the patient to say something weird about himself, and you pounce. Voters do the same thing.

When George H. W. Bush tried to show voters the scale of his caring by barking, “Message: I care!” they all suddenly saw the president of the United States stretched out on a Mies daybed, and they scribbled in their notebooks, “Patient seems concerned re: not caring impression. Patient may lack proper sympathy.”

… Or, as we might have scribbled in our notebooks as President Obama took his place on the couch: “Patient v. v. defensive re: lack of oil knowledge. Ego bruise? Anger due to inflated sense of self vs. inability to stop oil leak? Anger due to sense of self under fire from oil leak, voters, etc.? Sense that like college seminar, he is all talk, no action?”

… Especially when he added, gratuitously, that he wanted to know “whose ass to kick,” when everyone knew that what he really meant was “whose ass to sue,” which doesn’t sound very butch.

Message to speechwriters:

Strive to make sure that what you write makes sense for the speaker – and does not send embarrassing disobliging subliminal messages.

Easier said than done?