E-Tips

Avoiding the Al Gore Mistake

After all the dust has settled from the political conventions, at least one thing is clear. George W. Bush's message was clearer than Al Gore's. Bush hammered on his core message, while Gore's was buried in all the rhetoric.

About a third of the way through his talk, Bush told us what his core message was, "They had their chance. They have not led. We will." The message was short, crisp and clear. He said it four times, each time more dramatically than before. Of course the crowd went wild. The day after Bush's acceptance speech, I happened to be travelling. As I walked through the airport, I noticed in the rows of newspaper stands, one paper after another blared the repeated Bush slogan, "They have not led. We will." That is the definition of a successful speech. Bush's audience got his main idea.

Of course, if you think back to the 1992 election, George Bush (senior) had a very clear message that totally defined his position in that election, the now famous, "Read my lips, no new taxes." Perhaps clear messages run in that family. To show the enduring quality of that message, a friend recently reported seeing a Democrat's car with a bumper sticker that read: "Read my lips, no new Texans!"

So what happened to Gore's speech? His message was not well defined. His speech was structured in such a way that it was hard to identify what the take-away message was. The next day, the media was all over the board about what his main idea was. The headlines were not consistent. Some thought it was, "I stand here tonight as my own man." Certainly that was an important message for him to get across, especially since he wants to distance himself from Bill Clinton. It is not, however, a phrase that he can build a campaign around.

In his speech, Gore referred repeatedly to big tobacco, big oil, the big polluters, the pharmaceutical companies, and HMOs as the forces he will fight against. He repeated the phrase "working families" nine times and used the words "fight" or "fighting" 20 times. He clearly was trying to position himself as the defender of the people against the powerful forces that run our political and economic lives.

Gore's core message, was hidden toward the end of his speech, "They are for the powerful. We are for the people." Now, that is a message to build a campaign on. It should have been highlighted earlier in the speech and repeated often.

So, if we were to offer up a score card for these speeches, it would have to read: Core Message: Republicans, 1. Democrats, 0.

The next time you get up to speak, make sure your message is clear and repeated. Then ask yourself, "What will the headlines read the next day?"