There are many people inside and outside of Washington who will be analyzing the political outcomes of the recent Democratic debate at Otterbein University. As a contrast, I offer my view of each candidate’s performance as a public speaker, drawing on my 30+ years as a communication instructor and tutor. The comments below are based on notes I took while watching the debate at the Rike Center and also on a review of the debate transcript available on the Washington Post’s website. The opinions here are mine alone and are by no means beyond dispute. People who agree or disagree with them are invited to share their thoughts in the comments section at the end.

Senator Elizabeth Warren: If you like the “progressive” agenda — Medicare for all, cracking down on (and possibly prosecuting) pharmaceutical companies, banning assault rifles, etc. — you are going to like Warren because she articulates that agenda with intensity and aplomb. She is highly animated, using quick, precise gestures to punctuate her statements and drive home her points. She came up with a great metaphor when she said “Medicare for all is the gold standard.” She also used a technique known as repetition to emphasize her arguments. When condemning large multinational corporations, she  declared they “have no loyalty to America; they have no loyalty to American workers; they have no loyalty to American consumers; they have no loyalty to American communities.” Based on what I’d heard her say in the past, I thought Warren might sound self-righteous, but that wasn’t the case. Instead she came across as an “urgent messenger,” someone delivering critical information you ignore at your own peril.

Mayor Peter Buttigieg: The mayor of South Bend has a smooth, polished delivery. More than the other candidates, he made eye contact with whomever he argued. (His position on stage facilitated this, with Warren on his immediate right and only Yang between him and O’Rourke.) He made a conscious effort to build his credibility by referring to his military service. He also did something that seemed to come right out of Monroe’s Motivated Sequence. Step four of that sequence calls on a speaker to have the audience “visualize” a better future where the problem under discussion is solved. For his part, Buttigieg asked the audience to “visualize” a better tomorrow when we’ve “turned the page” on today’s problems and people feel more secure. As a speech instructor, I would urge Buttigieg to use more imagery in describing this better tomorrow. For example, how would students and teachers feel if there were stronger gun control measures? How would their lives be different? Finally, the mayor gave us a stinging example of a metaphor when he likened O’Rourke’s gun buyback plan to an attractive but useless “shiny object.”

Senator Kamala Harris: Not too many candidates used testimony to support their arguments, but Kamala Harris cited a quote by poet Maya Angelou to lash out at Donald Trump’s character: “Listen to somebody when they tell you who they are the first time.” She then reminded people what Trump said about shooting someone on 5th Avenue and getting away with it. Later she used the hypothetical example of a minimum-wage earning father “sitting at his kitchen table…trying to figure how he’s going to make it work,” and realizing the sacrifices he’ll have to make. Harris’ tone changed throughout the debate — sometimes defiant, sometimes pensive, sometimes frustrated. The last of these could be seen when she reflected on the mothers of homicide victims she had hugged, the autopsy photographs she had seen, and the police officer funerals she had attended. It was easy to imagine her pacing in front of a jury and making her presence felt throughout a courtroom.

Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke: For some reason, I found the former Congressman’s speaking to be the hardest to evaluate. Technically, there’s nothing particularly striking about either the content or delivery of his responses. Yet, somehow, at least at times, he seems to be straining. It’s as if he suspects his message is not getting through and he’s not sure what to do. He also seemed a bit evasive when asked how he would enforce an earlier pledge to take assault weapons away from people who owned them. He first expounded on how dangerous these weapons were before finally saying he would rely on the good faith of assault-gun owners to obey a mandatory buy-back law. From a textbook point of view, he gave a good illustration of a factual (as opposed to a hypothetical) example when he referred to the Las Vegas woman who was working four jobs while raising a child with disabilities. “She wants to know how we are going to help her, how we’re going to make sure her child has the care that she needs….”

Senator Bernie Sanders: It’s probably good that President Trump wasn’t at the debate, because there’s a good chance he’d have gotten into a fistfight with the Vermont Senator. Like Warren, Sanders has an animated delivery, jabbing at the air and sweeping his hands out. His tone is sometimes indignant, sometimes angry, almost always pugnacious. It’s as if he takes personal offense at billionaires, major corporation heads, and others who he perceives as having created the disparity in wealth among Americans. Sanders, probably more than any other candidate, used statistics to bolster his position, citing specific numbers of people (usually in the millions) who are bankrupt, unable to afford college, saddled with a huge college debt…or on a positive note, who will be employed under his Green New Deal. Sanders may have tried to appear more forthright than Warren by specifically saying he would finance Medicare-for-All in part by raising taxes on the middle class.

Entrepreneur Andrew Yang: It may not have shown on television, but this guy had the loudest supporters in the audience, including one who sat right behind me. Like Buttigieg, Yang has a smooth, confident delivery. There’s a friendly, good-natured tone to his voice that makes you wish you could join him for a beer or a cup of coffee sometime. While he took part in the debate on jobs, Yang was somewhat less confrontational than Buttigieg. He offered his idea of guaranteeing every adult citizen $1,000/month as a counter to Sanders’ proposed jobs guarantee, arguing that many Americans don’t want to work for the federal government. Yang’s most off-beat argument came when he noted that driverless trucks might result in millions of truck drivers losing their jobs; however, his most effective rhetorical moment came when he considered Warren’s proposed wealth tax. While acknowledging that such a tax “makes sense,” Yang quickly noted it had failed in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, and France where “massive implementation problems” and lower-than-expected revenues brought about its repeal.

Former Vice President Joe Biden: The former Vice President was a bit less fluent than the other candidates, occasionally stumbling on his words. When asked about his son’s involvement with a Ukrainian business, he said his son did nothing wrong. Maybe that’s all he could say, but people seemed to want more. Biden came across best when he talked about his experience and legislative accomplishments: helping to pass the Affordable Care Act, successfully fighting the NRA over an assault weapons ban, and helping create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. (Warren cast doubt on how much he helped with the last of these.) Finally, Biden provided a textbook example of how to use a hypothetical example to support an argument. Stating that Medicare-for-All would cost some $30 trillion over 10 years, he offered this scenario: “If you eliminate every single solitary soldier, tank, satellite, nuclear weapon; eliminate the Pentagon…it would only pay for four months of Medicare-for-All.”

Senator Amy Klobuchar: I’ve read editorials suggesting this debate was Klobuchar’s best performance to date. Maybe that’s true, because the senior Senator from Minnesota impressed me as more grounded in reality than some of the other candidates. She described Warren’s Medicare-for-All proposal as a “pipe dream” rather than a “plan” and chided Warren for saying that the other candidates on stage wanted to protect billionaires. “Not even the billionaire (referring to Steyer) wants to protect billionaires.” Klobuchar came up with a good metaphor for the aging of America’s population — “the silver surge,” and was poised and fluent throughout the debate without appearing overly combative. Most of the candidates referred to their personal experiences at one point or another, but I thought Klobuchar did that especially well when she supported unions by noting how they protected her grandfather when he worked as a miner and enabled her mother to make decent wages as a teacher after she divorced her husband.

Businessman Tom Steyer: Although he’s not a bad public speaker, Steyer didn’t stand out from the other candidates in any significant way. He stayed out of the debate over Medicare-for-All and gun control, and had noticeably less overall speaking time than his competitors. He noted (correctly I think) that he was the first among the candidates on stage to call for President Trump’s impeachment. He also made one of the few references to climate change, but that issue didn’t take hold as a major point of contention. Asked about the opioid epidemic, Steyer somehow ended up rambling on about gun manufacturers and “the corporate stranglehold on our government.”

Senator Cory Booker: Booker may have been the closest thing to a peacemaker in this debate. Rather than start — or join — an argument against any particular candidate, Booker affirmed his collegiality or friendship with everyone on the stage and warned them that “how we talk about each other in this debate actually really matters.” He was quick to support Kamala Harris’ call for more discussion on women’s reproductive rights and even went so far as to say that he would create an Office of Reproductive Freedom. Booker has a strong, authoritative voice, and that along with his sturdy 6′ 2″ frame gives him a commanding presence. His best moment probably came toward the end of the debate, when, using repetition as Warren had earlier, he stressed what love of country meant to him: “Love is struggle. Love is sacrifice. Love is the words of our founders who said…if we’re ever going to make it as a nation, we must mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor.”

Representative Tulsi Gabbard: Even before the debate started, Gabbard stood out as the only person on the stage dressed in a light-colored outfit. (The woman seated next to me thought this was a deliberate attempt to stand out in the crowd.) Once the debate began, however, Gabbard spent more time in the background than at center stage, speaking less than any candidate except Steyer. When she did speak, Gabbard was articulate but a bit stiff. Overall, she came across as something of a worrier. She worried that “hyperpartisan” interests would drive the impeachment process and that divisions within the country would deepen if the Senate failed to convict Trump. She did go on the offensive at one point, when she tried to have the other candidates agree with her that the U.S. should stay out of “regime-change” wars.

Former HUD Secretary Julian Castro: While not overshadowed as much as Steyer and Gabbard, Castro left me wishing he had said more. He speaks calmly and clearly but in a way that didn’t challenge the other candidates. More often than not, he agreed with what they said. He offered another good illustration of a factual example, focusing not on an individual as O’ Rourke did, but on a company in Iowa that manufacturers wind turbines and that was re-training workers from a closed-down Maytag plant. At other times, Castro raised potentially provocative issues. Those included limiting the terms of Supreme Court justices or cycling new justices in from the appellate courts, dealing with police violence, and cracking down on monopolistic trade practices. Unfortunately, he never had the chance to elaborate on any of them.