The following is from the Daily Beast. If you are looking for an example of someone who can consistently frame every single thought into a perfect sound bite, then look no further that Mike Huckabee. 

Mike Huckabee is saying what a lot of people are thinking about the danger of Obama tangling with the Clintons. “If he’s floating that balloon it better fly, because I think that to float the idea, and then to pull it away, I just think it would be disastrous for him from a public relations standpoint,” the former Arkansas governor told The New Yorker’s Lauren Collins. “It would be twice having rung the doorbell and not taken her to the dance.” The Obama camp is playing with fire, he suggests. “Surely they did know that she was married, and that her husband is named Bill, and that he used to be President. It wasn’t like they woke up and said, ‘Oh my, you know, I forgot all about him.’ You don’t open the door when you’re pretty sure there’s fire on the other side of it that’s going to come in and scorch the room.” Hot stuff.

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Huckabee consistently speaks in concrete, visual terms. He uses humor and emotion. His communication skills alone almost garnered him the GOP nomination in 2008–and this was when he had no money, no name ID and no national platform. Come 2112, Huckabee will have have all of those things, plus superior communications skills. He’s my pick for the early GOP front-runner for 2112.

Modern politics is supposed to be about big money, polling, backroom deals, and internet sophistication. Of course all of these elements have a role in campaigns. But the Iowa Caucuses were striking in that both the Republican and Democratic voters picked the two best public speakers for the two top slots to represent their parties.

In modern politics, this is unusual. John Kerry really wasn’t a great communicator. Bob Dole, not that great. And of course there is the strange case of George W. Bush receiving the Republican Nomination—twice.

Most of the time, public speaking simply plays a part, sometimes a small part, in voter selection. In 2008 Iowa, voters appear to have placed a heavy premium on public speaking skills.

I believe that if you put a random focus group of non-voters in a room and asked them to rank the 10 or so Democrats running for President a year ago and to rank each one purely in terms of speaking skills, these focus group individuals would have picked Obama and Edwards. Similarly, a focus group of non-voters asked to rate the speaking skills of the 10 or so Republicans running for president a year ago, these focus group participants would have selected Huckabee and Romney.

This trend is consistent with what futurist John Nesbit wrote about in the 1980s in his Megatrends books, i.e. the more high tech the world becomes, the more “high touch” the world becomes, meaning the more importance people put on so-called soft skills like public speaking.