Memo to Hillary Clinton.

Based on your performance today on "Meet the Press" and assuming you intend to run for President, I have this advice:

Speak in short sentences.

Avoid a robotic tone. Never speak as if you've memorized something.

Respond to a question in a way that makes the listener feel you are really trying to answer exactly that question. Don't distance yourself from the question with a lot of stock verbiage that makes it seem as though you're trying to make us forget the actual question.

Put another way: Study the interviews John Kerry gave during the last presidential campaign and make sure you don't sound like that.

Speaking about national security issues from Iraq today, you're trying to project an image of seriousness and competence. I get it. But you can't expect us to listen to a 74-word sentence like this (about Bush's upcoming meeting with Russian President Putin):

At the end of such engagement, at the end of an effort to try to, you know, move President Putin back on the path to democracy and free market economies and other matters internally, as well as trying to speak out strongly and engage him on the basis of some of the interference in Ukraine and elsewhere, if that proves unsuccessful, then perhaps I would agree that we have to take some additional measures.

Actually, that reads more lucidly than it sounded embedded in your long answer. But now I'm reading the transcript. Heard, that made me just want to shut off.

You speak as if you were afraid someone would take advantage of any pause to interrupt you, which is the speech tic of the world's most boring people. You don't need to stop up each gap with "you know" and "uh." President Kennedy did "uh" charmingly, but no one, absolutely no one, should emulate him.