Audio: Joy Connolly on campaign rhetoric

By The Economist | NEW YORK

RAPT listeners may swoon and faint at Barack Obama’s speeches, but his rhetorical flourishes have also drawn criticism from less oratorically-gifted opponents. Hillary Clinton, for one, has questioned whether there is substance behind Mr Obama's inspiring words. "We need to make a choice between speeches and solutions," she has said. But is that a false choice?

There are connections to be drawn between speech, character and action, says Joy Connolly, a professor at New York University and author of “The State of Speech: Rhetoric and Political Thought in Ancient Rome”. This week in our podcast, Ms Connolly leans on the great orators from antiquity to take a closer look at the rhetorical darts being thrown around on the campaign trail.

How does eloquent speech provide good evidence of good thinking and of virtue? That’s a claim that ancient thinkers, especially Cicero, are at great pains to try and defend...

Cicero judges speech as an index of character. And the reasons he does this—the reason many ancient thinkers do—is that he sees speech as a window into the mind. Cicero looks at a speech by his opponents or by his allies and he asks himself, “Is this speech indicating that the speaker is a thinker who is smart, consistent, well organized in his approach to the world? Is he engaged? Is he passionate? Is he in touch with the citizenry? And Cicero argues that all of these things can be read in a speech, in a person’s speech style.