flights

Edward Tufte famously declared that PowerPoint is evil, and in my life as a consultant, I’ve witnessed quite a bit of love and hate directed at the ol’ ppt. OK, maybe not love per se, but you’d think so from the application’s sheer ubiquity in all manner of pitches, strategies and summaries.

It’s a sign of confidence to present without PowerPoint, and many kudos are laid upon the rare folks who can stand in front of a room and communicate sans slides, charts, bullets or script.

Obama does this. Much is made of how eloquent he is, and it’s worth emphasizing that he often speaks without even so much as a note card. Even when he stands behind a podium, he never looks down.

But now, as we find ourselves in the thick of the presidential race, and silly talk of flag pins and tire gauges is starting to give way to headier discussions of the economy and energy policy, maybe it’s time for a little PowerPoint.

As the candidates argue about the efficacy of offshore drilling - one saying it won’t affect gas prices for a decade or two or perhaps at all, and the other saying it will bring down prices in a few months - it’s nothing but two guys arguing until someone busts out some data.

When Obama talks about the economic and national security impacts of importing so much of our oil from questionable dictators, it’s nothing but words until you actually hear factoids like…

• Enough solar energy falls on the surface of the earth every 40 minutes to meet 100 percent of the entire world’s energy needs for a full year.
• We send $2 billion every 24 hours to foreign countries to buy nearly 70 percent of the oil we use every day.

Those, by the way, came from Al Gore’s recent “Generational Challenge to Repower America” speech. I use Al Gore as an example because he won a Academy Award for a PowerPoint presentation. An Academy Award. For a PowerPoint presentation.

Clearly, you can’t fault the medium for the crap that you normally see in PowerPoint.

Remember Ross Perot running for president in 1992? He produced the first-ever infomercials for a presidential campaign. He didn’t use PowerPoint, but he showed us lots of charts and graphs. He was dismissed by many as a cartoon and a crank, but he got nearly 20% of the vote. That’s nearly unheard-of for a third-party candidate.

Bottom line is, the candidates are good at spewing positions and opinions, and they may think that people have no patience for the nitty gritty. But I think they’re wrong. I believe the first candidate who can effectively illustrate his opinions, who can bolster his positions with facts and figures packaged as delicious bite-sized morsels will take a huge leap in the polls.

In a word: compromise.

Now, compromise is often a good thing. I’m all for bi-partisanship. I want a candidate and a president who’s truly willing to look at all sides of an issue and accept that the other party’s point of view might be the right one. I don’t want a candidate who simply panders to the left or the right, and I actually appreciate Obama’s willingness to buck many members of his own party with his recent vote on the FISA bill, as an example.

I’m all for having “no red states and no blue states, but only the United States.”

But then there’s compromise that just seems spineless in a particularly Democrat kind of way, and that’s what I feel like I witnessed this week.

Barack Obama recently took a few steps back from his stance against expanding offshore oil drilling, saying:

If, in order to get that passed, we have to compromise in terms of a careful, well-thought-out drilling strategy that was carefully circumscribed to avoid significant environmental damage - I don’t want to be so rigid that we can’t get something done.

This is a compromise that seems transparently political. Obama’s lead over McCain has all but evaporated over the last week, and polls indicate that the candidates’ opposing views on oil drilling is a key factor. Obama’s move toward the Republican position on oil drilling, therefore, seems like a calculated attempt to neutralize McCain in this one area where he seems to have shown some strength, rather than a sincere effort to reach bi-partisan consensus. It is, “the same old politics” as Obama himself might say.

The problem with this particular compromise is that Obama has professed to agree with virtually all the experts on this issue (including spokesmen from the major oil companies) who say that expanding offshore drilling will have no effect on fuel prices until at least 2017, and little effect even then. This is the truth, and Obama knows it.

So this compromise feels political. It feels like pandering.

It takes quite a bit of courage for a candidate to stand up for the truth when it means telling people what they don’t want to hear, and Obama has made himself out to be the rare Democrat who has that kind of courage. Obama should tell people the truth. He should make a vigorous, passionate case for the truth.

The Republicans have succeeded in clouding the truth on this issue, and Obama’s response should be to clear away the clouds, to shine a bright light on the truth. Instead, he has chosen to accept the clouds.

My belief is that this kind of compromise is what has killed the Democratic Party. When you compromise on everything, then you stand for everything. And when you stand for everything, you stand for nothing.

And when you stand for nothing, then you don’t really give voters an alternative to what the other party offers.

And come election time, if you don’t offer an alternative to what the other party offers, then the people who don’t want to vote for the other party will simply stay home.

RELATED: Why the Democrats will lose in ‘08 - Part 1

File this under “random.” I’m not sure what to make of this, but as I was listening to the speeches of the various candidates after the caucus results were in, it occurred to me to count the number of times they used various pronouns.

Incidentally, I found no evidence that Fred Thompson actually spoke at all after his third place finish, so I substituted McCain - who was virtually tied with Thompson anyway.

Some things to note: I omitted instances of “you” in the numerous thank yous that started most of the speeches. McCain’s and Romney’s speeches were especially short - less than four minutes each. I believe Obama’s was the longest, although I didn’t time it. The applause he drew throughout certainly made it even longer. His 22 utterances of the second person pronoun was double Romney’s and nearly triple any of the other candidates. Clinton, perhaps not surprisingly, referred to herself quite a bit - using the first person singular more than any other candidate. Edwards - who also gave a long speech - referred to “we” and “us” more than the other candidates. It’s also worth noting that he devoted a significant part of his speech to stories about particular people (using third person pronouns for them).

For that matter, all the candidates used the third person numerous times to refer to family members and associates, to the other candidates and often in abstract references to “Americans” in general, as well as particular groups of American citizens. Initially, I was counting all the third person pronouns too, but the candidates used “they” to refer to such a wide variety of concepts that it became too muddy for my simple analysis.

Anyway, here are some key quotes from the evening:

Obama: “You said the time has come to move beyond the bitterness and pettiness and anger that’s consumed Washington.”

Edwards: “It’s our responsibility to ensure that we leave America better than we found it; that we give our children a better life than we’ve had.”

Clinton: “I am so ready for the rest of this campaign, and I am so ready to lead.”

Huckabee: “Ladies and gentlemen, I recognize that running for office, it’s not hating those who are in front of us. It’s loving those who are behind us.”

Romney: “We love you. We’re going to miss you for a few months, but we’re coming back. We’ll never forget what you’ve done for us. We love Iowa.”

McCain: “We can feel the momentum that — the same kind of momentum we felt in 2000. I’m very confident with a strong positive finish here that we’re going to win here in New Hampshire.”