With Super Tuesday upon us, and its blizzard of last-minute candidate speech making, it’s

time to finally face the question: What importance do voters actually place on a politician’s oratorical skill? This essential quality, about which Americans are deeply conflicted and in denial, has rightly surged to centre stage in this year’s Democratic primary race.

There are two main reasons for this. First, the meteoric rise of Barack Obama is largely attributable to a single speech he delivered four years ago at the national party convention in Boston.

There may be no other American political figure whose career has been so profoundly enhanced by one instance of oratory.

Second, Hillary Rodham Clinton has taken pains to undercut Senator Obama by accusing him of dazzling voters with fancy rhetorical flourishes. “Words are not action,” Senator Clinton asserted in the final New Hampshire debate. “As beautifully presented and passionately felt as they are, they are not action.”

Admittedly, Clinton’s remarks were mostly a tactical ploy. Nonetheless, she has inadvertently highlighted our troubled attitude concerning the value of political public speaking. Americans

believe that oratorical skill is a legitimate reflection of intellectual acuity and depth of character. Then again, we believe it also is merely a form of flimflam, a practiced slickness shrewdly employed by those wishing to distract us from substantive shortcomings.

Yet most of us believe there’s a correlation, and possibly a very strong one, between verbal skill and intellectual aptitude. On the other hand, most of us know good people who are not particularly good with words, and bright individuals who regularly stumble and stutter. Some may prefer straight talk, but “plain-spoken” remains a mark of praise mostly when it describes someone’s integrity, not their speaking style.

Regardless, speeches, debates, and press conferences remain a vital means by which we can gain an unfiltered glimpse of who these candidates are and how they express themselves in formats that are not wholly under their control. Despite the central role of the spoken word in political campaigns, most voters are woefully ill-equipped to judge candidates on the basis of their ability to give speeches.

We do ourselves serious harm with this inexperience, detachment, and inattention. Unable to formulate opinions that go much beyond blind hunches, we resort to a range of sloppy, superficial proxy considerations. Voting for a candidate based solely on speaking ability would be folly. But to dismiss such a capability as incidental or unimportant leaves a mighty large gap in the checklist of virtues.

Spoken words, slight as they are, still represent our best opportunityto “know” these candidates (yes, better than TV ads, celebrity endorsements, spit-polished résumés and rejiggered position papers). Yet without voters prepared to be discerning listeners,

it will be an opportunity squandered. — The Christian Science Monitor