Obama Vs. MLK

The speech by Barack Obama started out very well. It stated what it was going to argue about, and then it continued to tell why. Then about halfway through the speech he breaks into a story that seems to have nothing to do with what he was talking about. The story continues for about 8 paragraphs that would lose anyone who wasn’t a political speaker. It lost me after 2 paragraphs and I had to go back and reread the three paragraphs before the story to find out the basics of what he was talking about. After the story he tries to go back to what he was originally talking about and link it to the story, but didn’t succeed. Overall, I couldn’t tell what Barack Obama was even arguing for or against. Half the time I didn’t know what he was talking about.
The speech by MLK was a very good speech. It started out with him explaining where he was and a brief explanation as to why he is there, he brings in a story but limits it to about one paragraph. By limiting it to one paragraph he made sure people wouldn’t get bored with it and that people still got the basics of what was going on. After that he begins to argue his case. To argue his case he put in facts, and other short stories that support that part of the argument. At no point in the speech did I lose interest or not understand what he was trying to get across.
Over all the story in Obamas speech and the lack of apparent links between the story and the argument, were the major downfalls of that speech. There was also no well defined argument. The short stories and well explained links made the MLK speech very interesting and strong.