Lesson One in Screenwriting 101 is Show Don’t Tell. In a well-made film, the story advances by action; in a lesser film, the story advances by exposition, the characters describe the action; in an inferior film, the story advances by an unseen narrator.

The anticipation leading up to Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address yesterday was as emotionally loaded as awaiting the outcome of a lottery drawing, and as covered in print as much as the Super Bowl. Experts of every type from historians to speechwriters, and from journalists to speech coaches (full disclosure), offered their expectations of what Obama would say. In most cases, opinions focused in two general areas: themes and inspirations. It would be wise to allow the gold dust to settle a bit before commenting on the grand themes of this momentous occasion, so let me focus only on the sources of Obama’s inspiration.

Given the many characteristics that Barack Obama shares with Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, most writers forecast (full disclosure, again) that there would be echoes of, if not direct references to the classic words of those two presidents. There were indeed echoes, but they were very faint. Most of Obama’s words were very much in the here and now; about the challenges facing the nation and what we must do to confront and resolve them. And he couched those issues and actions in his very own words and his very own rhetorical tropes, rather than draw upon others.

Only when he neared the end of his speech did he cite a source directly, and it was George Washington. Quoting from the First President’s First Inaugural, Obama intoned, “Let it be told to the future world…that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive…that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it].”

It should come as no surprise that Obama looks so deeply into our nation’s roots. One has only to look at his own breakthrough speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, when he quoted the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights;” and in his March, 2008 speech on race, when he quoted the Constitution, “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.” It was not until his victory speech last November that he quoted Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural, “We are not enemies but friends. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.”

Given to force and power of yesterday’s speech, I’d say President Obama doesn’t need any help.

John F. Kennedy had Ted Sorenson to help him craft his Inaugural Address; Barack Obama has had Jon Favreau, a 27-year old wunderkind, as his campaign’s head speechwriter. But Barack Obama also has himself. Before there was even a presidential campaign, he wrote his breakthrough 2004 speech himself and, in the middle of that campaign, when he had to deliver his crucial speech about race, the word is that he wrote it himself.

Given the extraordinary circumstances and focus on his presidency, it would seem that his Inaugural Address, too, has to be a completely personal effort. And there is no question that he has the skills to do it.

But what will he say?

Jill Lepore, a Harvard history professor, in an excellent New Yorker article about the evolution of inaugural speeches, says, “Inaugurals are written for the future, but they look, mostly, to the past.”

Jeff Shesol, one of Bill Clinton’s speechwriters, participated in a New York Times forum about inaugurals with other former presidential speechwriters, in which he recommended that Obama should “strike the right balance between speaking to the moment and speaking to history; between addressing the audience and addressing the ages.”

Another history professor advocates looking to the past to develop themes for the future. Julian E. Zelizer, of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School, proposes three themes drawn from three previous president’s inaugural speeches.

1. “Explain what each American owes the country in 2009 rather than vice versa,” as Kennedy did in his Inaugural: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”
2. Restore “national confidence in the economy, in the government and in the country itself,” as Franklin D. Roosevelt did in his First Inaugural: “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
3. “Outline a philosophy of government” as Ronald Reagan did in his First Inaugural, “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

Obama, an avid historian, often looks to the past. He references Abraham Lincoln frequently for both his civil rights pioneering and for his poetic prose. But, as he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, “Every time you read that second inaugural, you start getting intimidated …there’s a genius to Lincoln that is not going to be matched.” Obama then went on to say that the main task in his speech was, “to try to capture as best I can the moment that we are in … and then to project confidence that if we take the right measures that we can once again be that country; that beacon for the world.”

Anna Quindlen emphasizes the importance of projection in her Newsweek column, “He needs to unite, to inspire and to challenge. There’s no better way to do that than by delivering a great speech about great matters … a speech to make the hair rise on the neck and the heart sing in the breast.”

Given Obama’s past performances on the podiums of the country, there is no doubt that he can do that.

Yes, he can.

When Senator John McCain lost the presidential election, he gave a concession speech that was lauded for its dignity in defeat. After congratulating Barack Obama on his victory, McCain added:

It is natural—it’s natural tonight to feel some disappointment, but tomorrow we must move beyond it and work together to get our country moving again. We fought—we fought as hard as we could. And though we fell short, the failure is mine, not yours.

At that, his audience roared “No!” But McCain continued.

I am so deeply grateful to all of you for the great honor of your support and for all you have done for me. I wish the outcome had been different, my friends. The road was a difficult one from the outset. But your support and friendship never wavered. I cannot adequately express how deeply indebted I am to you.

John McCain’s running mate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, denied the opportunity to speak at the same event, proceeded to do her own post-mortem on the failed campaign in a series of television interviews with Greta Van Susteren of Fox News and Matt Lauer of NBC’s “Today,” among others.

Palin’s most recent interview was a week ago with John Ziegler, a film producer who is preparing a new documentary called, “Media Malpractice.” One has only to click on Ziegler’s website to know that he would give the governor free reign to air her opinions about the recent campaign; and air them she did—with a vengeance. Ziegler posted excerpts of the interview on YouTube. Asked her view of the media, Palin said:

You know, I have the same question that perhaps you do, and others who would participate in this documentary, even try to figure out. Is it political? Is it sexism? What … what is it that drives someone to believe the worst, and perpetuate the worst in terms of gossip and lies?

Two of the most powerful factors impacting the Palin candidacy were Tina Fey’s scathing impression of her on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” and a disastrous interview with CBS’ Katie Couric. Ziegler asked Palin to comment on both:

I did see that Tina Fey was named Entertainer of the Year and Katie Couric’s ratings have risen. And I know that a lot of people are capitalizing on … I don’t know … I just think that exploiting that was done via me and my family and my administration. That’s a little perplexing and also says a great deal about our society.

Tina Fey’s impression was another in a long line of other notable SNL impressions: Dana Carvey’s George H. W. Bush, Phil Hartman’s Bill Clinton, Will Ferrell’s George W. Bush, and Darrell Hammond’s John McCain; but none of those subjects ever complained about exploitation.

Katie Couric’s supposed exploitation was to ask Palin—repeatedly to no avail—to name the newspapers she reads. Sarah Palin’s view of the Couric interview:

My understanding there are so many other topics that were brought up, certain things weren’t portrayed as accurately perhaps as they could have, should have been after that interview.

Ziegler also brought up the subject of Caroline Kennedy’s attempt to fill Hillary Clinton’s New York Senate seat. The governor’s reaction:

I’d been interested also to see how Caroline Kennedy will be handled, and if she will be handled with kid gloves or if she will be under such a microscope. Also, it’s going to be interesting to see how that plays out, and I think that, as we watch that perhaps we will be able to prove that there is a class issue here also, that was such a factor in the scrutiny of my candidacy versus, say, the scrutiny of what her candidacy may be.

No sooner did Caroline Kennedy express interest in Clinton’s job than the media began to scrutinize her. Ben McGrath’s article in The New Yorker reported on one of Kennedy’s interviews:

She met with a couple of Times reporters recently and said “you know” a hundred and thirty-eight times. Speaking to the News, and on NY1, she broke two hundred.

Now that’s scrutiny.

Politics, sexism, gossip, lies, Tina Fey, Katie Couric, exploitation, inaccurate portrayal, and class issues are not scrutiny, nor dignity; they all have one lowest common denominator: blame.

We’ve all been in the audiences of far too many presentations that unleash all the bells and all the whistles of PowerPoint animation with a frenetic, pyrotechnic display that challenges a Fourth of July celebration. This phenomenon is like putting a 14-year-old boy behind the wheel of a Ferrari Testarossa.

That such excess happens is no surprise. All the many options in the pull down menus and ribbons of PowerPoint animation (in Slide Transition alone, there are 58 effects grouped into five categories, with three speed options for each) are as tempting as are all the many buttons, levers, dials, and gears in the cockpit of a Ferrari. They cry out, “Try me!”

Uncontrolled, they can cause a crash of the car or of a presentation.

The obvious solution is to exercise restraint, but that is negative advice. What to do instead? There are three simple overarching rules that, if followed, will bring your presentation to life (after all, that is the definition of animation) and, more importantly, bring clarity, if not tranquility, to your audiences.

Rule One: Make the default direction of your animation left to right.
Text in Western languages is printed from left to right. This simple fact drives how human beings perceive visual stimuli. When your audience sees images move from left to right, it will feel natural and pleasing to their eyes—and make them more receptive to you and your message.

Rule Two: Use motion to express the action in your message.
If you want to show rising revenues, have your animation move from the bottom up; if you want to show declining costs, have your animation move from the top down. If you want to send a negative message—about your competition—reverse direction, and move your images right to left.

Rule Three: Allow your audience to absorb your animation.
The highly sensitive optic nerves in your audience’s eyes cause them to react involuntarily to light and motion. The instant your animation starts, all of their attention suddenly shifts to the screen and away from you. Because your audience is so focused on the animation, they do not hear what you are saying, nor do they see what you are doing. Therefore, whenever you introduce animation, stop talking, turn to the screen, and allow the animation to complete its full course of action.

The presenter’s actions and words, as well and the design and the animation of the graphics, must be closely integrated. They all come together in a technique called Graphics Synchronization, drawn from the world of television directing. If you would like to learn more about this unique skill, you can find it in Chapter Eleven of The Power Presenter.

Valentine’s Day is a full month away, but yesterday’s Senate confirmation hearing on the nomination of Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State, gave the junior Senator from New York her bouquet a month early. Most of the senators spent most of their allotted time during the hearing tooting their own horns or praising Clinton rather than scrutinizing her. In turn, when Clinton had the floor, she heaped praise on her colleagues. After observing the mutual admiration celebration, Slate’s Mike Madden titled his report, “To Hillary with Love.”

These high profile hearings can get very testy. Witness the sharp grilling of the automotive executives at the end of last year, and of President Bush’s Supreme Court nominees three years ago. When senators consider one of their own, however, they change their tone. As Madden put it, “lawmakers never show more deference to a nominee than they do to a nominee who still, technically, serves with them.”

The only semi-serious challenge during the session came from a dubious source: Republican David Vitter of Louisiana. Vitter, who was implicated in a personal scandal in 2007, brought up Bill Clinton’s finances, particularly the Clinton Global Initiative, and then asked his wife, “Would you support and help produce an amended MOU that would bring the same disclosure to future contributions to the Clinton Global Initiative?”

Having dealt with this issue extensively in public, Senator Clinton was primed to answer.

In this particular case, the Office of Government Ethics and the career ethics officials at the State Department have looked at the rules and concluded there is not an inherent conflict of interest in any of my husband’s work at all. However, the foundation and the president-elect decided to go beyond what the law and the ethics rules call for to address even the appearance of conflict and that is why they signed a memorandum of understanding, which outlines the voluntary steps that the foundation is taking to address potential concerns that might come up down the road.

Even The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd, one of Clinton’s sharpest critics throughout last year’s primary campaign, was impressed; today she wrote of the exchange with Vitter, “Hillary swatted him away.”

As evidenced by her performances in the Democratic primary debates against a very sharp opponent in Barack Obama, Hillary Rodham Clinton is eminently capable of handling tough questions. Her senate colleagues threw her only hearts and flowers. For hardballs that truly challenge her, she’ll have to wait for the likes of Putin, Chavez, or Ahmadinejad.

The past weekend brought us two excellent examples of the art of interpretation by two grand masters of interpretation; one a virtuoso of words and the other of music: Abraham Lincoln and Frank Sinatra. Each example was an appreciation from a highly-qualified source.

In the current edition of The New Yorker, Jill Lepore, a Harvard history professor and a novelist, in an article anticipating Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address, turned to one of Obama’s favorite inspirational sources, Abraham Lincoln. Revisiting The Great Emancipator’s memorable First Inaugural Address, Professor Lepore tells us that Lincoln gave a draft of the speech to William Seward, his nominee for Secretary of State, who wrote a new ending:

I close. We are not, we must not be, aliens or enemies, but fellow-countrymen and brethren. Although passion has strained our bonds of affection too hardly, they must not, I am sure they will not, be broken. The mystic chords, which, proceeding from so many battle-fields and so many patriot graves, pass through all the hearts and all the hearths in this broad continent of ours, will yet harmonize in their ancient music when breathed upon by the guardian angels of the nation.

Ever the wordsmith, Lincoln revised Seward’s words:

I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

The appreciation of Sinatra, the ultimate tunesmith, was provided by a fellow tunesmith, Bono, the lead singer of the band U2, who sang a duet with Sinatra on a 1993 album. Bono is also a contributing columnist for The New York Times and, in yesterday’s edition, he wrote about two recordings Sinatra made of his classic song, “My Way.”

The first was recorded in 1969 when the Chairman of the Board said to Paul Anka, who wrote the song for him: “I’m quitting the business. I’m sick of it. I’m getting the hell out.” In this reading, the song is a boast—more kiss-off than send-off—embodying all the machismo a man can muster about the mistakes he’s made on the way from here to everywhere. In the later recording, Frank is 78. The Nelson Riddle arrangement is the same, the words and melody are exactly the same, but this time the song has become a heart-stopping, heartbreaking song of defeat. The singer’s hubris is out the door.

To what end? Duality, complexity. I was lucky to duet with a man who understood duality, who had the talent to hear two opposing ideas in a single song, and the wisdom to know which side to reveal at which moment.

It also ain’t what you sing, it’s how you sing it. ‘Nuf said.

Yesterday, in his first speech since the election, President-elect Obama spoke at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, where he formally unveiled his stimulus plan to address the economic crisis. But the magic carpet ride of his vaunted rhetoric ran into a snag. The New York Times, in a lead article, reported resistance to the plan, even among his senate allies. Moreover, the usually-supportive newspaper was less than thrilled about his delivery of the speech. They wrote, “Known on the campaign trail for inspirational addresses, Mr. Obama on Thursday was sober and ominous, summoning the nation to meet a daunting task.”

Andy Borowitz, the political satirist, was not so constrained in his online comments: “Hoping to calm a nation whose nerves have been rattled by economic woes, President-elect Barack Obama today delivered the first in a series of numbingly boring speeches designed to put the nation to sleep.”

Has the bloom come off Obama’s rhetorical rose even before he gets to give his much anticipated Inaugural Address? What happened? A very simple analysis of the text reveals what went wrong. Obama fell into the classic structural trap of spending too much time on the problem before getting to the solution. Problems are, of necessity, expressed in sober and ominous tones. The speech ran only 17 minutes, but Obama spent almost half of it describing the economic crisis that every man, woman, and child in this country is living through daily. He finally got around to his plan at about the seventh minute.

Waiting half the movie to bring in the cavalry is desirable in Westerns, because it keeps the audience in suspense and munching lots of popcorn. In speeches, the audiences, deprived of popcorn, don’t have that kind of patience. The speaker has to get to the point quickly.

From the sparkling string of his previous speeches, you know that Barack Obama will get his story straight on January 20th. Yes he can.

At the beginning of my career as a speaking coach, I spent many tortuous, torturous, and torturing hours copying the mistakes of conventional presentation skills training, treating businesspeople as performers, thus perpetuating a counterproductive approach for both the instructed and the instructor. The very word ‘‘training’’ denotes rigorous discipline; while ‘‘coaching,’’ derived from the word for a transportation vehicle, denotes movement. My goal was to move the businesspeople I coached to become successful presenters naturally.

In search of solutions to my dilemma, I looked back on my days as a producer of public affairs programs at WCBS-TV in New York City. A key part of my job was to invite men and women from the government, academic, health, scientific, and culture sectors—none of them performers—into our studios. To help make these people feel comfortable and look comfortable in the stressful circumstances of appearing on camera, we leveraged the basic format of public affairs television: the talk show. By structuring our programs as conversations—person-to-person interviews or small group discussions conducted by professional moderators—we put our non-professional guests into familiar settings that promptly reduced their stress levels.

Another part of my job was to screen hours and hours of new and archival film and videotape, conduct hours and hours of interviews, read stacks and stacks of reports, and condense all of that information into a clear 28-minute-and-40-second program. In doing so, I developed an array of techniques to distill and focus ideas.

Looking at those two job functions in retrospect made me realize that control of content and control of mind would make the stressful circumstances of speaking in public or delivering presentations less onerous for business people—and for all human beings for whom standing in front of an audience provokes a fear equal to, if not greater than, that of heights, insects, or flying.

At that moment, the vicious cycle of copying mistakes ended and The Mental Method of Presenting began. My own coaching business, Power Presentations, provided a broad set of techniques to help presenters and speakers clear their minds by organizing their stories, and then to deliver them as a series of conversations rather than as performances.

De´ja` vu! Businesspeople in Silicon Valley promptly experienced the same comfort in presentations as did our guests in the CBS studios. Now that this powerful methodology has evolved and proven successful for two decades, its techniques are now available to wider audiences via our books and workshops. Now any presenter can learn how to feel natural and appear confident in front of any audience.

What does it take to get children to listen? Do they listen with their ears, or are they reacting to what they see?

When I call out to my son or give him instruction, he laughs and runs away, as though it’s a game. I never gave it much thought, he’s a two year old…that’s what they do. However, there are times when I want to make specific points with my son, and instruction I want heard. This had me thinking, I needed a on solution for how to best communicate with my young child.

Let me back up for a moment and describe my son to you in better detail.

He is the most independent person I’ve had the pleasure of knowing. Yes, I do realize he is only two.

He climbs into his own high chair and buckles himself in when he’s ready to eat. He wants to brush his own hair and tie his own shoes, saying, “I wanna do it myself!” To keep from fighting with him, I now buy shoes with velcro closures and let him wear hats to cover his badly brushed hair. “No,” is his favorite word, and the opposite of what I say has now become the most interesting thing in the world to him.

Do I yell? Do I cave in? Do I treat him like a baby?

Absolutely NOT, to all of the above. I use a very simple business communications approach, eye contact.

Now, when I speak to my son, I kneel down to his size, I look him in the eyes, both eyes, and wait for him to connect back to mine before I make my point. Low and behold…he not only hears me, but he listens. He puts away his toys, stops the noise, he puts his cup in the sink (he’s a tall two year old,) he sits down and pretends to read his book.

I still get the “No, mommy,” and the “I no want to,” but I have found a way to win a few battles.