Macron May Need a Page From Bill Clinton’s Playbook to Out-Debate Le Pen
- Macron’s wordiness in speeches limits his appeal to voters
- Le Pen bludgeons her opponent with simple, direct phrases
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France’s presidential front-runner Emmanuel Macron may need to study Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign war-room board before his face-to-face television debate with rival Marine Le Pen on Wednesday.
Clinton’s strategist James Carville put down four winning rules in the now-famous sign at his Little Rock, Arkansas, campaign headquarters. One of them read: “The Debate Stupid.” Clinton, a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, worked on conveying his ideas in folksy, accessible terms, using short sentences and gestures for emphasis -- skills that not only got him elected, but make him a prized speaker even now.