Word: iacocca
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...Iacocca's tough-guy face and intense, you-gotta-believe-me manner are not supposed to work well on the cool medium. Perhaps Americans permitted him to confound the rules because he seemed like almost no one else in the limelight: he is, after all, the apotheosis of the regular guy. To a viewing public ordinarily soothed and stroked by carefully inoffensive spokesmen, Iacocca's bluntness was electrifying. In addition, of course, there has been the sheer quantity of exposure over the past five years. In all, Iacocca's 30-second spots have reached 97% of American households an average...
...merely a matter of his potent personality. For unlike most video- generated celebrities, Iacocca was not famous simply for being famous: he had done something. By 1983, everyone could see that Iacocca had, in fact, carried out his immense logistical mission. He had managed to whip a sprawling company into shape, and saved American autoworkers' jobs by the tens of thousands. Congress had fussed. The White House had postured. Out in the Rust Belt, Iacocca proved he could make things work. His feat was by no means single-handed: the Government's $1.5 billion guarantee of Chrysler loans was essential...
Indeed, if Americans like the rather subdued Iacocca they have seen for 30 seconds at a crack on TV for the past five years, they love the full-bodied Iacocca they experience in person. Of the more than 3,000 speaking engagements he was offered last year, he accepted only 46. He devotes enormous energy to + each performance. At the 1983 University of Michigan graduation exercises, the audience was not hot for him at first: the seniors were naturally rather self- absorbed, and a commencement speech, after all, is just a commencement speech. But no, Iacocca is not dour...
...Iacocca claims that before he took Dale Carnegie courses at age 25, he was a terrible speechmaker. Nowadays in public, and often in private, he seems more a crackling stand-up monologuist than a sober corporate spokesman, a sort of Rodney Dangerfield who gets all the respect in the world, or George C. Scott's Patton turned happy and unthreatening. "I gotta tell ya," Iacocca told a wined-and-dined gathering of stock-market analysts in Detroit earlier this month, "with our $2.4 billion in profits last year, they gave me a great big bonus. Really, it's almost obscene...
...Iacocca talks nonstop, like the salesman he is. If not for the humor and the regular flashes of common sense, his declamations would be rants. When Iacocca gets going, which is usual, he pauses only when he runs out of breath. He is in such a rush to say so many things that he cannot always be bothered to find the mot juste: if guys is his trademark noun, helluva is Iacocca's favorite modifier...