How Not to Have a Sean Spicer Moment

As a communications coach, I’m constantly urging our clients to make use of one of the most effective public-speaking tools out there: the well-crafted analogy. Notice I said “well-crafted?” That’s because an analogy is like a loaded grenade in your hand. If you don’t know how to handle it, it can maim. (how meta is that, to issue a warning about analogies by making one?)

Sean Spicer discovered this the hard way when, in front of the entire White House Press corps, he broke a rule that’s in every public speaking 101 handbook: Don’t compare anyone to Hitler or anything to Nazi Germany. There is zero upside to this, in fact, it’s like jumping with both feet on a land mine. The resulting Ka-Boom from his mind-boggling miscalculation could be heard way beyond the press room full of slack-jawed reporters. It reverberated far and wide, resulting in a truly rare occurrence: a member of the White House appearing on CNN to issue an apology. 

Analogies do not work when you’re discussing matters of life and death. Assad’s heinous acts are so atrocious that they need no comparison. The sheer inhumanity of them, and the horrifying images of the death and suffering they caused, speak for themselves. To compare one act of genocide against another in an attempt to weigh them on some kind of atrocity scale is unthinkable. Spicer should have known that.

When used properly, analogies are effective because they allow you to help an audience better understand a concept that perhaps is unfamiliar by comparing it to one that is common and familiar to their experience. Colin Powell, the former Secretary of State, is the author of one of the greatest of all time. When asked for his opinion on whether the United States should invade Iraq he said, “this is the Pottery Barn Principle – if you break it,  you own it.”  The geo-political ramifications of regime change probably isn’t something in which the average person is well versed. But knocking over a breakable in a store is an experience we all get.

But when you compare merely an unfortunate mishap to an incident where there was loss of life, only bad things can happen. After the 2010 political debate in which Rick Perry forgot the third federal agency he would abolish, a former aide to George Bush called the gaffe, “the human equivalent of the Shuttle Challenger.” That kind of ludicrous comparison dishonors those who intrepid explorers who lost their lives. 

But if you are going to roll the dice and share a provocative comparison, at least get your facts right, something Spicer failed to do. Spicer insinuated that Assad is worse than Hitler because he gassed his own people. Many Jews who were German were among the millions exterminated in the Nazi gas chambers, which were the chemical weapons of that era. 

Analogies are a concise and effective tool to make your point resonate with an audience, but unless you are looking to have your own Sean Spicer Moment, handle them with extreme care.