Hillary Clinton is bad at speeches for the exact reasons she'd be a good president

Updated by Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias matt@vox.com Jul 28, 2016, 2:00p

Hillary Clinton has one job tonight: Deliver a kick-ass speech.

Unfortunately, it’s just not a job that suits her talents. In a rational world, "rousing convention speech" would be a job permanently bestowed on Barack Obama who, after all, got himself elected president largely on the strength of a rousing convention speech. Bill Clinton is very good at it, too. Joe Biden is good. Michelle Obama is great. Beyond the top ranks, Cory Booker shows a lot of promise. Nobody sensible would have watched Gavin Newsom in the early evening Wednesday, but he’s really good, too.

Clinton, by contrast, struggles with this stuff. And it’s not just because her delivery isn’t perfect; in many ways I think it’s underrated. It’s that her speeches themselves often aren’t very good. They’re over-stuffed with ideas that don’t necessarily relate, and flattened out like a computer merge of a dozen different people’s speeches rather than reflecting a distinctive voice or viewpoint.

That follows from the way she works. It’s a process that’s really bad at delivering memorable oratory, but actually makes a lot of sense as a model for running the executive branch. As Politico’s Annie Karni has detailed, Clinton favors a broadly collaborative approach to speechwriting involving three or four campaign staffers, a similar number of outside consultants, some longtime friends and associates not formally on the campaign, a couple of big-name ex-speechwriters and, of course, her husband. And in addition to the more-is-more philosophy of who gets input on the speech, she favors a more-is-more approach to content as well.

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http://www.vox.com/2016/7/28/12308198/hillary-clinton-speech-dnc