Just two months before the Tucson shooting, Giffords won a congressional election against Republican opponent Jesse Kelly, who invited voters to a campaign event with an offer to help ‘remove Gabrielle Giffords from office’ by firing ‘a fully automatic M16 rifle’. Kelly’s campaign poster also featured a photograph of the candidate as a US Marine toting an assault rifle beside a headline that read ‘send a warrior to Congress’. During the campaign Giffords was also one of twenty congressional Democrats targeted by the crosshairs of gun sights on a poster released by 2008 Republican vice-presidential candidate (and potential presidential candidate), Sarah Palin.

Do the likes of Kelly and Palin have blood on their hands? Legally, no. Politically, though, Palin has a perception problem, a problem she exacerbated, in a video statement posted online on 12 January, in which she accused her critics of manufacturing ‘a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn’. Apparently, the former Alaskan governor was unaware of the long anti-Semitic history associated with the phrase ‘blood libel’. Gabrielle Giffords is Jewish.

The words of Sir George Savile – a man who knew a thing or two about navigating partisan waters, having negotiated his way through post-Restoration England as a wilfully independent politician – come to mind: ‘Men’s words are bullets that their enemies take up and make use of against them.’

It is too early to say whether Obama’s lauded memorial address and Palin’s lambasted ‘blood libel’ statement will have a bearing on the 2012 presidential campaign; the primaries are too Byzantine to predict, the electorate too vast to generalise, and the nation itself possibly too traumatised by war and recession to care. This much is certain, though: Obama and Palin are the two most polarising figures in contemporary American politics, a fact drawn on in speechwriter and historian Dennis Glover’s curious new book, The Art of Great Speeches and Why We Remember Them.

What makes Glover’s book intriguing is its ambition. It is, Glover states in the introduction, a defence of oratory, a history of oratory, an explanation of how oratory works, and a source of technical and practical lessons for ‘budding speechwriters’. In other words, what we have here is a speechwriter’s field guide.

Want a crash course on the principles of rhetoric going back to Cicero? Want to wade through the entrails of seventy speeches, both modern and ancient, factual and fictional, to understand what makes them great? Want to, through a comparison of technique, substance, and passion, know who the ideal orator might be? Then this is your book.

Glover is well qualified to answer the questions he poses. He has written for the likes of Julia Gillard, Kim Beazley, Simon Crean, and Mark Latham, and is sought after as a speechwriter-for-hire in Canberra. Typical of many Australian politicians and political staffers, Glover is an avid student of US politics. He reveres the work of John F. Kennedy (‘my choice for Cicero’s mantle of ideal orator of the world’) and his speechwriter, Ted Sorensen. Other speechmakers, from Martin Luther King Jr to Adolf Hitler, are covered, as are speeches from Shakespeare’s plays (Henry V, Julius Caesar, King Richard II), the films of Ridley Scott (Gladiator) and the television episodes of many an apparatchik’s guilty pleasure, The West Wing.

Along the way, Glover makes some interesting observations, such as that the wartime speeches of Winston Churchill were influenced more by the poetry of Shakespeare than by the politics of Cicero:

[Churchill] succeeded because he combined the rules of rhetorical style … with an historian’s sense of historical moment, and because he employed topoi from the storehouse of English history and drama that had such a deep hold on the English psyche that they were almost guaranteed to create the desired response from the audience. His speeches framed the way we understand the events of 1940.

Glover stretches the point, though, when he contrasts Churchill’s achievement during the Blitz with the failure of wartime Australia to drum up a ‘comparable unifying narrative’ during the dark days of 1942 – claiming that ‘the significance of Australia’s great moment’ was belatedly recognised in the 1990s, in large part because of the combined efforts of then-Prime Minister Paul Keating and his now-estranged speechwriter, Don Watson. Drawing such an oratorical parallelogram has merit, but is too neat to stand up to scrutiny.

Of greater interest is Glover’s take on the 2008 presidential election. Here he compares Obama and Palin to Brutus and Antony, respectively, touting the campaign as a ‘potentially revolutionary situation’ at the height of a two-decade-long ideological cold war between the ‘liberal left’ and ‘conservative right’. Obama’s speech before a crowd of eighty thousand at the Democratic Convention and an estimated television audience of forty million was, Glover notes, downright Roman – complete with a stage featuring Doric columns. Palin’s speech to the GOP Convention, before another gargantuan television audience, eschewed Graeco-Roman props, but, like Obama’s, had ‘many similarities’ to the speeches of Brutus and Antony as imagined by Shakespeare. ‘Depending on your politics,’ Glover writes, ‘you will likely love or loathe Obama or Palin, but what no one can deny is their quality as orators.’ I can. Placing Sarah Palin in the same league as Barack Obama as a speechmaker is akin to claiming that the Monkees were the musical equals of the Beatles.

There is much to disagree with in The Art of Great Speeches and Why We Remember Them. Then again, there is also much to agree with and much to learn from. If you are a speechwriter or speechmaker, it is well worth possessing, because, unlike so many of the corpulent collections of speeches that are supposed to have changed the world, it attempts to bring the nuts and bolts of great speeches to life. Not only that; it is, to Glover’s great credit, unashamedly idealistic about the need for authentic public language and debate.

My one complaint is that I would have liked more space given to the mechanics of great and not-so-great Australian speeches, and more heat applied to the feet of those who, instead of finding a truly Australian style of rhetoric, settle for fashionable derivatives of the latest Barack Obama or Tony Blair or Sarah Palin. Australia is yet to hear its equivalent of the Gettysburg Address.