A few years back, then Senator Joe Montoya of New Mexico was to give a speech somewhere when an aide accidentally slipped him, not his speech, but the news release about that speech. However that didn't stop Montoya, who started telling the audience something like this: "Senator Joseph R. Montoya, Democrat, New Mexico, today endorsed the XYZ bill before the Jones Group. To thunderous applause, Senator Montoya..." etc. etc. By this time, of course, the audience was indeed thunderous, but from laughter, not applause. Still, vacuum-head Montoya plunged right ahead, through the entire news release, past tenses, third person references and all, before leaving without so much as a raised eyebrow of irony.
Goodness knows we all want to get it right - at least, righter than that. Those in the public eye, especially, wish to handcraft every syllable to put our best foot forward, not in our mouth.
That, and new technology to enable it, may explain how we came to get the teleprompter president. President Obama has always been the technology guy. He announced his presidential run on the internet, for Pete's sake. He raised enough money there to... well, to stimulate the economy, for one thing, but that's another commentary. Anyway, it's not so surprising that he makes use of technology. It's the extent of his use. Extent, after all, is the difference between the connoisseur and a wino, and we may have elected a man who's gone from the enabling drug of a crackberry, to the hard stuff. And goodness knows, Obama freebases the teleprompter.
He has it everywhere, at news conferences, important meetings and announcements of new nominees, where those glass panes often get in the way of news media trying to shoot pictures of the nominees. At one recent gathering involving Senator John McCain, the photos caught the relatively short McCain in what looked like a picture frame through that annoying prompter. The president announced his next nominee for Commerce Secretary from the teleprompter. Then Governor Gary Locke stepped up to the podium and pulled out a piece of paper to respond. When Obama announced his next nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, he read from the teleprompter, then said, "Kathy?" And Governor Kathleen Sebelius had to wait 9 months of pregnant pause, TV cameras running all the time, until the teleprompter went down periscope.
I'd lay you odds that, somewhere on the second floor of the white house, by the breakfast table, is a teleprompter with the script reading, "Will you please pass the salt?" In the bedroom there's probably one reading, "Oh my god! Bare arms really turn me on!"
Former President George W. Bush used the teleprompter, of course, at major events, but for smaller ones, he used note cards. Former Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer tells Politico that a teleprompter before small groups "removes you from the audience in the room".
Yes, with note cards, you actually occasionally look at the, you know-audience you came to address! With that teleprompter, it's like the speaker is watching a very slow tennis match, as his eyes bounce back...and forth...and back...and forth...from screen...to screen.
It's not like notes are a sign of weakness (memo to President Obama and Chief Justice Roberts. If the president is reelected, you might remember that when administering the oath of office in 2013). Winston Churchill, back in the Jurassic pre-teleprompter days, used to wave about his extensive notes to prove how much research he'd done on his remarks. Plus, who do you think you're fooling? We're pretty media-savvy these days. We know that Brian, Charlie, and Katie don't memorize the introductions to all those taped reports each evening on TV. Plus, even though those transparent glass panes are designed to be as inconspicuous as possible, they're not exactly invisible.
MR. PRESIDENT, WE ALL KNOW YOU'RE READING.
Still, there goes that teleprompter, to county fairs, to campaign rallies, and even once to a rodeo, giving the term ubiquitous a bad name. And the sure sign of a junkie is withdrawal symptoms. In one speech the president-elect gave in a factory in Bedford Heights, Ohio, he spoke only from notes on a podium. And he hemmed. And hawed. And awkwardly paused. And accented the wrong syllables. And generally sounded like a grade school dropout, not a Harvard Law grad. Yes, take away that prompter, and you have someone a few eloquent phrases short of a Great Communicator. Such as when we learned about our "57 states" What?-we added DC, Puerto Rico, and 5 Canadian provinces? Or did Heinze Foods buy a presidential product placement? And of course there was the president appearing with Jay Leno and talking about his bowling score. The Special Olympics remark might have been better applied to his verbal gutter ball than to his bowling.
Plus, even use of a teleprompter doesn't remove all error. If you fail to phoneticize certain words, you wind up with the president saluting Orion Energy Systems for being green, whole Orion CEO Neal Verfuerth turned green hearing the president mispronounce his company every single time. And who can forget Obama's St. Patrick's Day remarks with visiting Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen. Reading right past his own teleprompter remarks, President Obama said, "First, I'd like to thank President Obama..." Oops! Another Montoya moment!
Of course, there are potential answers besides giving up the teleprompter cold turkey. For one thing, there's now work on special eyeglasses which will scroll a speech right across the lenses invisible to anyone more than a couple of feet away. He'd just have to get us used to a four-eyed chief of state again, something we haven't had since Harry Truman. But the contact lens version can't be far behind. And I've had occasion to use something which avoids any printed script. It's called the EarPrompter, and it consists of a pocket recorder on which you record your speech, and a small transmitter which plays your voice back to an ear bud. You simply repeat yourself, and it's easier than it looks. And how far can we be from a brain implant which goes directly from somebody's computer keyboard, straight to the cerebral cortex.
But beyond those considerations is something noted by talk host Glenn Beck, who said, "The teleprompter is really, really, really bothering me. It bothers me that this man is always on prompter. You wanna talk about a Manchurian Candidate? That's it! Who's writing every word for this man."
I seem to recall a fuss about who might have been sending secret offstage earpiece information to George W Bush during the presidential debates. Let's ask the same question this time. If's like the Wizard of Oz. Who's behind the curtain? Who, wanting badly to be president himself, could have come up with a digital marionette who might go over better with the voters. Let's look behind the curtain. Where we see.....Oh No! It can't be! Not President Sharpton!
