Famed political speech coach Christine Jahnke dies at 57
Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton among her clients
Christine Jahnke, a speech coach who helped hundreds of female candidates seek and win elective office over the past three decades by bolstering their confidence and honing their messages, died Aug. 4 at her home in Washington.
The cause was colon cancer, said her husband, Paul Hagen.
Jahnke was a sought-after figure in Democratic politics — a coach and consultant brought in by the party, campaigns and interest groups to train candidates and activists to speak amid the hurly-burly of the political arena and in the sound bites often extracted for use in the news media.
Among her clients was Michelle Obama, whom Jahnke coached early in her tenure as first lady in the use of a teleprompter. Jahnke consulted on Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential run and helped prepare speakers at five Democratic presidential conventions, the Million Mom March for gun control in 2000 and the Women’s March in Washington after President Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017.
She coached politicians including Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut when he was the running mate of Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore in 2000. But she was best known for her efforts to elevate female candidates at the local, state and national levels as they ventured onto a political scene rife with persistent sexist stereotypes and expectations.
She showed them how to “be sure your voice is heard when you’re a woman in a man’s world,” Stephanie Schriock, president of Emily’s List, an organizations that seeks to elect Democratic women who support abortion rights, said in an interview.
Jahnke “made a lot of women candidates better communicators,” Schriock observed, “and by making women better communicators, she helped elect a lot of women to office and that’s changing this country today.”
Jahnke was the author of two widely disseminated books: “The Well-Spoken Woman: Your Guide to Looking and Sounding Your Best” (2011) and “The Well-Spoken Woman Speaks Out: How to Use Your Voice to Drive Change” (2018). But she was not, by her own description, a natural public speaker.
Flash point
Jahnke moved to Washington to work in media training shortly before the 1991 confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, a cultural flash point during which law professor Anita Hill appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee and on national television to detail her sexual harassment allegations against Thomas. (Thomas ultimately was elevated to the high court.)
“She was so poised in an extremely pressurized situation ... alone at that table, facing that all-white, all-male panel,” Jahnke said in a 2019 podcast with the online publication Slate. “She handled herself with such composure and calm given the types of questions they were hurling at her. I really had a lightbulb moment.”
The 1992 election cycle brought a record number of women to Congress. One of Jahnke’s clients was Democrat Patty Murray of Washington, who won her Senate seat that year. From then on, Jahnke devoted much of her time to helping women overcome the pressures — internal and external — that have often prevented them from running for office.
“I rarely meet women candidates who have decided early on that politics is a career path,” Jahnke told the Washingtonian. “They get into it because of something that happened to their family or because they want to make a difference . ... They can recite policy forwards and backwards, but they’re not necessarily good on camera.”
Many female candidates and their champions say that while voters tend to assume a male candidate is qualified, they expect a woman to prove her qualifications. If a female candidate is overly forceful, she may risk being called “shrill”; if she holds back, she may appear weak. In addition to those concerns is the matter of “likability,” a nebulous word that has become ingrained in the parlance of horse-race politics. Female voters, Jahnke found, could at times judge female candidates as harshly as male voters did.
“There is not a level playing field,” Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, said in an interview. Women face “more scrutiny of things like their appearance, their voice and their facial expressions — everything.”
Teaching techniques
She helped women perfect their tone — although “they have been dealing with the tone police all of their lives,” she told the New York Times. She also taught them techniques for interrupting a long-winded debate adversary, such as waiting for a natural pause. But often the problems she sought to resolve were more elemental, chiefly the lack of confidence that she often found among women who came to her for help.
For those clients she provided constructive criticism, but with what her admirers described as a gentle touch. “In a world that demands perfection from women,” Schriock said, “she had a way to guide a woman to change without being intimidating, with total kindness.”
Jahnke said she found fulfillment working with female political candidates because while men run to “be something,” women run to “do something.”
Christine Kay Jahnke was born in Albert Lea, Minn., roughly 100 miles south of Minneapolis, on Aug. 4, 1963. Her mother was an administrative assistant at a community college, and her father was a pipefitter at a food processing facility.
Jahnke received a bachelor’s degree in mass communications from Winona State University in Minnesota in 1985. She was inspired to work in television news, she said, by Mary Richards, the Minneapolis newswoman of the sitcom “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”
After leaving TV, Jahnke worked on the 1988 Democratic presidential campaign of Massachusetts
Gov. Michael Dukakis before moving to Washington. She joined Sheehan Associates, a communications training firm, before opening her consulting firm, Positive Communications, in 1991. In 2012 she received a master’s degree in liberal studies from Georgetown University.
In addition to coaching political candidates, Jahnke provided public speaking and media training for representatives of Black Lives Matter, Planned Parenthood, Amnesty International and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, according to information provided by her husband.
Julie Burton, president of the Women’s Media Center founded by Jane Fonda, Robin Morgan and Gloria Steinem, estimated that Jahnke had trained 70% of the women who have attended the center’s media training programs.
Survivors include her husband of 25 years, Paul Hagen of Washington and Quogue, N.Y.; her parents, Wayne and Sharon Jahnke of Albert Lea; a sister and a brother.
After decades of training women in how to compete with men on the political stage, Jahnke observed in recent years an intriguing development. Gradually, she said, male candidates have become more attuned to their images as they run against more women — and more concerned that they not come off as “‘broviators’ and ‘mansplainers’ and ‘manterrupters.’”
“Are you aware of any gender-specific trainings or advice for male candidates — ways that they can appear less angry and shrill?” a Slate journalist asked Jahnke last year.
She replied, “Maybe that’ll be the new cottage industry.”