CFK Gaffes Highlight Risks Of Ad-Hoc Speeches

President Cristina Fernández is famous for her ability to speak extemporaneously.

She can speak for lengthy periods and expound on complex issues – without notes – with ease. She often displays a remarkably sharp memory and an uncanny knack for remembering numbers and details.

The president has repeatedly talked about the fact that she doesn’t – ever – write or deliver written speeches. All of her comments are off the cuff, and very often they’re delivered in an entirely ad-hoc manner.

But this approach has its downside.

Fernández has repeatedly made mistakes, given incorrect numbers, fumbled facts and made statements that, in the worst case, offend or, in the best case, seem inappropriate. In some cases, her comments can make her appear ignorant.

Of course, anyone who speaks often in public is bound to make mistakes. Even the best speakers – even Barack Obama – are capable of the occasional gaffe.

But Fernández’s refusal to either write or deliver prepared speeches increases the odds that she’ll make a mistake or say something untoward.

Such was the case Thursday night when, for the first time in her presidency, Fernández visited the Buenos Aires Stock Exchange.

In her remarks, Fernández told the audience that people who invest in the stock market should make sure that making money is their priority. As if telling fish that it’s a good idea to stay in the water, Fernández said investors should focus on making a profit and not on ideology.

While that’s blatantly obvious advice, it’s nevertheless sound. What came next wasn’t.

Fernández said she wished that Argentines were in the same condition as U.S. citizens who, on average, make enough money to invest in the stock market.

She said she wished that Argentines, like Americans, could “invest in companies like Ford and General Motors.”

Her choice of words was important. Had Fernández made the same statement a decade or two ago, when General Motors was still a powerful company, her comments wouldn’t have seemed so unfortunate. But General Motors is now famous, more than anything else, for exemplifying the tragedy of the U.S. financial meltdown.

It is a completely failed, bankrupt company. It’s self-destruction cost its shareholders – average Americans among them – hundreds of millions of dollars in losses.

If you look up the traditional ticker symbol for General Motors you won’t find it. Instead, you’ll learn that the old symbol, GM, has been replaced by MTLQQ.PK, which stands for “Motors Liquidation Company.”

The stock is worthless. The company was taken over by the U.S. government and is now popularly called Government Motors, symbolizing not its success but it’s near total failure. The stock lost so much value that some of its shareholders even considered suicide.

“While the common stock of Motors Liquidation has not been canceled, investors should not interpret that as indicating that the shares have any value,” the U.S. Securities and Exchanges Commission said last month.

General Motors may yet make a comeback. But it’s hardly an example of successful management. Today thousands of recent retirees are hurting because their stock portfolios suffered losses thanks to their investment in General Motors.

If Fernández had prepared her remarks before giving them, she might have chosen a better example of how people can successfully invest in the market. She could even have chosen an Argentine company that has done well here or abroad.

Her gaffe at the Stock Exchange was minimal. It wasn’t the end of the world. It won’t enter the history books and most Argentines probably will never even hear about it.

But Fernández didn’t give her speech before a group of average Argentines. She delivered it to the very people – stockbrokers, investors and business executives – who are most likely to recognize her comment for what it was, an unintentional but revealing gaffe.

The audience at the stock exchange was full of the same people whose help Fernández most needs if she is to attract more investment and boost confidence in the government and its economic policies. It was full of the people who most distrust her administration.

In this sense, her remark, as innocent as it was, is unlikely to help her win support or boost her credibility.

The comment was a reminder of the risk the president faces when she speaks extemporaneously. It was a reminder of the time when she went to celebrate the opening of Google’s new office in Buenos Aires. While there, she spoke highly of Microsoft, Google’s arch enemy. That too was a minor glitch. But people noticed it and commented about how “out of touch” the president can sometimes seem.

A much graver example of the president’s presentation problems came during a recent speech she gave about the broadcasting of soccer games. The speech was meant to be a happy moment, an announcement that soccer games – once seen only on Pay-Per-View TV – would be shown for free on open-air stations around the country.

But instead of sticking to the light-hearted subject of football, Fernández turned, as she often does, to the exceptionally unfortunate history of Argentina’s Dirty War. Instead of limiting herself to the joy of sport, she spoke of the “disappearance” of some 30,000 people three decades ago. She linked all of this to soccer and what she said had been “the kidnapping of goals.”

Fernández compared the way football games were previously broadcast to the kidnapping and murders that took place during the Dirty War. For many people who had lived through the Dirty War, it was a truly infelicitous moment.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Paz Adolfo Pérez Esquivel described the comments as “absurd.”

“What the president said is a barbarity,” Esquivel was widely quoted as saying.

Adriana Calvo, of the Argentine Association of Ex Detained and Disappeared persons, said the remarks were “clumsy and grotesque.”

The week before this, in another ad-hoc speech, Fernández compared negative reporting in the media with being mowed down in a “fusillade” of gunfire.

Fernández may have some valuable points to make. And surely her critics aren’t right all of the time.

But the president does herself no favor when she gives such little forethought to how she can express herself, especially when talking to those who already question her credibility.

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