Evaluation of convention speeches in 2020

In past years, I gave evaluations of the acceptance speeches at our political conventions. I’m not going to do it this year. There’s no point. It doesn’t matter what President Trump and Vice President Biden say or how well they say it because most of you have already made up your minds. You love one and hate the other. For you, the one you love will speak with the flowing eloquence of John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. all rolled up into one. And the one you hate will ramble in indiscernible grunts and incoherent mumbles. The actual quality of their speech and content is irrelevant.

This is a shame because in Toastmasters, I learned to evaluate speeches based on their delivery and content regardless of whether I agreed with them or not. And I have given evaluations for speeches I strongly disagreed with. I owed it to the speaker to give them a fair appraisal of their talk. It also benefitted me because in studying their positions, I can do a better job in stating my case when the time arose.

However, politics have become so divisive that to listen to the other side’s speeches can be considered treason. And if you listen to your team’s speeches and have less-than-glowing feedback, that’s treasonous too. This doesn’t just hamper the art of speech evaluation. It’s dangerous to society.