Something has changed since World War II, and I don’t mean lapel widths and skirt lengths.  Public oratory as FDR and Churchill practised it harkened back to the Ancient Greeks more than it looked forward to Reagan, Martin Luther King, and Bill Clinton.  It was formal, delivered from a podium, and rhetorically elegant. 

To be sure, both of those politicians used radio to good effect, but it had nothing like the transformative effect that television has had.  Instead of rhetoric now, for the most part, we have conversation. 

Because television has brought our leaders, politicians, and speakers up close, as if they were in our living rooms, we now demand that they talk to us like our neighbors might.  Anything else seems fake, pompous, or over the top. 

The result has been that our speakers have had to learn a new kind of rhetoric, one that follows the contours of everyday speech more closely than an Ancient Greek funeral oration, say. 

But it also means that when leaders do adopt high rhetorical phrasing, the effect is to create a sense of high seriousness.  If the speaker carries it off, without becoming pompous or boring, then the result can be very powerful.  In truth, both kinds of speech are available to the speaker today, if used with care.

Conversational phrasing can become too trite for the occasion, just as more elegant flights of rhetoric can go over the top.  And we still have a sense that, during important civic moments, the speakers should show their sense of the occasion by upping the rhetorical ante. 

What is the appropriate language of public discourse?  It’s anybody’s to influence, to create, to master.  The key test is always authenticity.  That’s what we demand of our speakers first, last, and always.