Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will arrive on Capitol Hill to a darker mood than when he swooped in last winter for a hero’s welcome, as the Russian invasion is grinding into a third year and U.S. funding hangs in balance.
Zelenskyy’s visit Tuesday comes as President Joe Biden’s request for an additional $110 billion U.S. aid package for Ukraine, Israel and other national security needs is at serious risk of collapse in Congress. Republicans are insisting on strict U.S.-Mexico border security changes that Democrats decry as draconian in exchange for the overseas aid.
“It is maddening,” said Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., a close ally of Biden, of the stalemate. “A very bad message to the world, to the Ukrainian people.”
Tougher times for sure, but a particularly good leader can rally a mood just themselves, with words, nothing more.
He’s been compared to some truly titanic wartime leaders. But it’s time to see what you’ve really got Zelensky.
For the record, I’ll be perfectly content if he just doesn’t make anything worse. Historical superheroics isn’t genuinely necessary, just a proud, hardworking man doing what he must for his country. That would probably go over fine here in America. People remember he’s just some dude, a comedian no less, we would understand that.
But if he’s got it in him, he could give some sort of Gettysburg Address type thing. Short, sweet, and hard-hitting.
edit because copy/pasting the whole thing was probably a little ostentatious.
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He did great. But this point is more of a nadir, when allied interest is flagging and he could start to feel betrayed. And he’s not fresh, he’s been beaten down and hammered by all the constant challenges.
You can just see it in his face. This is when he could really rise to the occasion, though.
In this media environment, speeches do not seem to ring out anymore based on how good an orator a person is. I’m afraid that he might need to sound more like Trump than one of the great speakers to get people’s attention.
Good oration requires an emotional approach and some poetry. The analytical skills necessary to thrive in the modern world have largely replaced these, and very rational people don’t overly care for emotional arguments. Honestly, we just don’t get good oration anymore, Trump’s hyper-nationalistic approach is just the closest we get. Because he’s not a particularly analytical guy.
Zelensky has the skillset to pull it off though, where 99% of them simply lack the skills.
Y’know, Lincoln could’ve said “87”, but he went with “four score and seven” because it sounds cool. Today most would just say “87”. The poetry is lacking.
And also today if someone started a speech with “four score and seven years”, the soundbite driven meme culture would inundate the internet with “I scored a foursome seven years ago” or some such bullshit. Most people wouldn’t know what the hell a score is and rather than half a second of googling, would spend hours crafting their “witty” response for social media.
Right, you would definitely want to use a more modern form of more emotive speech than one from a couple centuries ago.
My example was less that “people should say score instead of 20” and more “speeches needs to sound good too”. Where today people usually focus more on content than delivery, so they often don’t care if they sound stuffy.
Have you ever heard trump speak? Half the time it’s unintelligible. All his supporters care for are soundbites. And they ignore the ones that they don’t like (eg “take the guns first, then comes due process”) in favor of vague and inane platitudes they can chant like the brainwashed cultists they are (eg “lock her up” or “drain the swamp”).
That’s because they’re responding to his delivery more than his content. The content is less important. It matters less what he says than it does how he says it, how he sounds. Where more professional people generally pay more attention to what they’re saying–is it a good idea/bad idea, what actually is it, and less on how they sound. Which results in them often sounding a little dull.
It’s a style vs substance thing. They’re just two different, specifically acquirable skillsets.