To follow up on my last post about voices and politics, let me comment on what I think about the voices of our two main Presidential candidates — in sum, I think that they are both horrible. Well, I always found Trump’s voice just as annoying as everything that he says. Actually, it might be the way that he uses his voice to say what’s on his mind — his inflections and tonal modulations just scream out “BIG BLOWHARD WHO DOESN’T KNOW WHAT HE’S TALKING ABOUT”.<\/p>\n
As to Hillary Clinton, her speech-voice is like fingernails on blackboards, amplified 1000 times. I know that a lot of other men don’t enjoy her angry, screechy tones, and that a lot of women and progressive men have written articles calling us sexists<\/a> for our vocal preferences. Well, that may be true; but it still doesn’t make Hillary’s speeches any easier to listen to. The ironic thing is that I’m old enough to remember hearing Hillary speak (on TV or radio, I never saw her in person — I didn’t work for any of those big financial firms who paid her to talk), back when she was First Lady or Senator from New York. She seemed a lot easier to take back then. Even her 2008 primary campaign voice didn’t seem especially offensive.<\/p>\n I believe that Ms. Clinton has recently tried to keep up vocally with Bernie Sanders, who was trying to sell the notion of revolution in his campaign. And to be honest, I didn’t particularly enjoy the “take to the streets” implications of Bernie’s voice. But I’m sorry — Hillary Clinton just can’t do Bolshevik revolutionary as well as Bernie can. You’d think that she could now calm down on the podium and take David Axelrod’s recent advice<\/a> to her, i.e. “let the mic do the work”. But the “Big Blowhard” is closer in the polls to Hillary than he ought to be, and so she continues to address us as though we are in an emergency. (And yes, from that perspective, maybe she’s right.) <\/p>\n So just which politician’s voice do I like? Well, that’s not easy to say, I have to think about that one. I remember other Presidents whose voices I also didn’t like — Ronald Reagan’s voice was often irritating, although when he went full-actor mode and turned on the drama, it sometimes worked (e.g “Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall”). George W. Bush’s twangy intonation was always a headache-causer. His father’s words were usually dull and lifeless. Obama gave great speeches, but there was something vaguely phony in his “down home” phrasings (an intellectual like Obama does NOT naturally speak like that — can you imagine him giving a Constitutional law lecture at Harvard in that tone?). Jimmy Carter’s southern drawl seemed to reflect sincerity, but at the same time uncertainty and perhaps ineptitude. And Richard Nixon? His voice could have been good, if he had good things to say and had he felt good about himself. <\/p>\n About the only President’s that I remember who had good voices and vocal patterns were John F Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson (an old guy like me can never forget his standard opener, i.e. “My Fellow Americans . . . “). That’s going way back to the 1960’s. Given our present choices, it does not look like the 50-year presidential vocal drought will be broken any time soon!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" To follow up on my last post about voices and politics, let me comment on what I think about the voices of our two main Presidential candidates — in sum, I think that they are both horrible. Well, I always found Trump’s voice just as annoying as everything that he says. Actually, it might be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6321"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6321"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6321\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6353,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6321\/revisions\/6353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}