Reagan’s gift of golden delivery

President Bush has it, but only in one-on-one encounters. Rudolph W. Giuliani has it, but only in an emergency. Bill Clinton has too much of it; Sen. John F. Kerry, it seems, too little. North Carolina Sen. John Edwards seems to have it, “but you get the feeling he stayed up all night practicing,” as one critic put it. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger would have it were it not for the way he says “Collie-fornia.” Audiences, experts say, find accents to be wearying.

As Americans reflect this week on the legacy of the late President Ronald Reagan, the unspoken question has been: Who has what it takes to be the next “Great Communicator” on today’s national stage? Not as a policymaker, not as a statesman, but in the realm for which Reagan will arguably be most broadly remembered -- as a master of delivery in the age of television.

“There you go again.” ... “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” ... “Evil Empire.” ... “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Love him or loathe him, Reagan was a rhetorical hit machine.

How many graying candidates could have mustered the grace of self-deprecation against charges that they were too old and out of touch to run for office? (“I’m not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent’s youth and inexperience,” Reagan joked in a debate, devastating former Vice President Walter F. Mondale.)

What other world leader, in the midst of massive budget deficits and an AIDS epidemic, would have gotten away with the corny pronouncement that it was “morning in America?”

What other modern politician could have pulled off the poetry that Peggy Noonan, then a young special assistant, ginned up for him after the Challenger space shuttle explosion? (Try standing in front of a mirror some time and declaiming, “We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them this morning as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye, and slipped the surly bonds of Earth to touch the face of God,” as if it were something a person might say ordinarily.)

“Reagan’s reputation does create a shadow over his successors,” says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Such a shadow, in fact, that Reagan’s knack for public presentation has become the stuff of rhetorical study: Jamieson devoted an entire chapter to him in her seminal book on the evolution of the political sound bite, “Eloquence in an Electronic Age.”

Before Reagan, she says, politicians struggled, with varying degrees of success, to adapt their communication styles from the stump to the cooler and more intimate confines of television. “Richard Nixon had a good prosecutorial style and he argued well, but he looked uncomfortable,” Jamieson notes, pointing out that the poignancy of Nixon’s 1952 “Checkers” speech, in which he invoked his wife and his dog on television to plead for national forgiveness, was for him the exception, not the rule.

Presidents “Ford and Carter tried delivering speeches informally -- think about Carter’s sweaters -- but they could never quite match the delivery to the moment,” she says. “Part of it was that anybody who comes up as a stump speaker will adapt poorly to TV.”

With his background as a sportscaster, an actor, a pitchman for General Electric, a lecturer on the anti-communist circuit in 1960s Southern California and as a governor who, even then, still wrote many of his speeches, Reagan had an intimate understanding of what worked with audiences and how to match words with images.

“Reagan made himself a major political figure through the force of his communications,” says Noonan, who is now a conservative commentator. Long before he had speechwriters, she says, he was perfecting his style, which was inspired in large measure by the fireside chats of an earlier electronic president, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Reagan’s 1964 “A Time for Choosing” speech, in which he made the case for presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, is now regarded by some as the birth of the modern conservative movement, but Noonan notes that it was a speech he’d been practicing, in some form or another, for months on the rubber chicken circuit.

“He was a giver of regular radio essays and a newspaper column. He used to write these in planes and trains and automobiles -- the originals are all in the Reagan Library, I’m told,” says Noonan, who calls those early works “amazing.”

Far more than his contemporaries, he understood how the medium of television cried out for a style other than the high-flown rhetoric of the podium, says Robin Lakoff, a UC Berkeley linguistics professor who studies the language of politics.

“Reagan understood that when you’re in that little box in people’s living rooms, you’re sort of small, and the way you talk has to be more intimate than when you’re in front of thousands of people,” she says. “It’s different even from radio, where you can’t be seen but your voice permeates a room somehow.”

It was Reagan who brought the epic backdrop -- the beaches of Normandy, the New York Harbor -- into use as an essential tool of TV-age oratory. It was Reagan too who popularized the use of personal stories and little anecdotes -- some true, some less so -- in presidential speeches and who invited “ordinary Americans” to his televised addresses so he could use their presence to illustrate his arguments.

His 1976 presidential campaign, for example, featured the now-infamous story of the Chicago “welfare queen” with “80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards” and a “tax-free cash income [of] over $150,000.” In fact, her income was actually about one-twentieth of that, at some $8,000, but his point was famously taken.

Six years later, in his first State of the Union speech, there was Reagan’s declaration that “we don’t have to turn to our history books for heroes.” On cue, the cameras cut away to the gallery of the House of Representatives to focus on 28-year-old Lenny Skutnik, who had rescued a plane crash victim from the icy waters of the Potomac River. Since then, the “ordinary American” in the gallery has been a staple -- some say a cliche -- of presidential speeches, but in the early 1980s, the idea was regarded as a political innovation.

“Reagan reset the standard for televised communication,” Jamieson says. “He is to television what Franklin D. Roosevelt was to radio.”

Speechwriters who worked for him say that gift was as much innate as self-taught. Easygoing by nature, Reagan had the ability to live in the moment and to shake off slights and grudges that might sour the demeanor of less lighthearted executive, they say.

Unlike, for example, his then-vice president, George H.W. Bush, Reagan could convey warmth to an audience without inhibition, and that disarmed even his harshest critics. Though his policies were often criticized by nonconservatives as harsh and ill-considered, voters rarely connected them, emotionally, with him as a person.

This, his admirers say, is because Reagan was a genuinely nice guy.

“Between the public Ronald Reagan and the private Ronald Reagan, there was no difference,” says Peter Robinson, a speechwriter for six years in the Reagan White House, where, among other things, he penned the famous 1987 speech in which Reagan called upon Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall. It was an address whose most celebrated line would have been excised by nervous diplomats and State Department staffers had Reagan not known instinctively how powerfully the challenge would play as a sound bite and insisted upon its inclusion, Robinson says.

“The [former] Canadian Prime Minister, Brian Mulroney, tells this story -- he was eating with Francois Mitterrand, the French Socialist president, and Mulroney said that Ronald Reagan was a great public speaker, and Mitterrand said, ‘Non, non, non! It is not speaking -- he has communion with the American people.’ ”

That sort of mass connection, experts say, is a far cry from that of the current president, whose personal charm -- a striking characteristic in private, face-to-face encounters -- dissolves so often in public settings that he has become famous for such “Bushisms” as, “You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.”

“Some people just don’t have it,” Lakoff says. “The Bushes, both father and son, just seem to have a gene that, when they speak in public, makes their tongues swell up like a banana -- there’s a lot of discussion about George W. Bush as the new Ronald Reagan, but with Reagan, you could put a script in his hand and he’d go to his mark and he’d deliver. The current president can’t seem to utter a coherent line.”

Bush partisans dispute that, but not entirely.

“I think highly of George W. Bush and you can argue that he’s an heir to Reagan -- he takes his speeches very seriously, he works on them hard, he insists on using plain language and moral clarity,” says Robinson, who is now a fellow at the Hoover Institution and whose book “How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life” will be issued in paperback next month by Harper Collins. “But what you don’t find is just that natural giftedness. Reagan just had a gift.”

That gift has been the holy grail for a generation of Republican politicians, in the same way that modern Democrats have aspired to the natural grace of John F. Kennedy.

Aram Bakshian Sr., who was director of speechwriting during Reagan’s first term and who consults with numerous other politicians, says that, unfortunately, Reagan’s ability to connect with and reassure audiences was something a politician either has or doesn’t.

“Reagan’s legacy was not so much a legacy as the lesson that here’s what you can do with these qualities, if you have them,” he says.

Nonetheless, experts say, some politicians have been able to do more with that lesson than others. For example, Lakoff says, Kerry’s speaking style is like that of a great communicator from an earlier era: John F. Kennedy. Unfortunately for him, that era is past.

“Fifty years ago, we wanted our presidents to sound solemn and high flown and maybe even a little better than us, but those expectations have changed,” she says.

Jamieson says Clinton was, in his way, as gifted a communicator as Reagan, but only when it came to extemporaneous speech.

Bakshian agrees. “Clinton was a talented speaker,” he says, “but he always went on too long -- he had that salesman’s belief that if I can sell a dozen eggs in five minutes, give me an hour and I can sell the whole barnyard. John Edwards has that down-home stuff, but you get the feeling he stayed up all night practicing it, whereas with Reagan, it was the real thing.”

Bakshian says Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, for whom he has worked as a private consultant, and Giuliani, the former New York mayor, have impressed him. But Powell has said he won’t run for high office and Giuliani’s finest hour will forever be linked to one of the nation’s most grotesque calamities.

“Arnold Schwarzenegger, in some ways, could be the Reagan of his time and generation,” Bakshian says, noting the governor’s genial charisma and celebrity-age media savvy. “He doesn’t have the range of emotions, but he knows how to say what he means.”

But, Jamieson adds, the Austrian accent that has endeared Schwarzenegger to movie crowds undermines him with voters. “The dialect creates a kind of charm but it requires audiences to listen more intently to get the meaning,” she says.

Conservative activist Gary Bauer says that for all the understanding candidates now have of the media, the true heir to Reagan has yet to emerge. “There have been, over the years, a number of people who’ve tried to inherit his mantle, but so far no one has done it,” says Bauer, who was a member of the administration for all eight years of Reagan’s tenure.

“He’s just a hard act to follow.”