James Taranto wonders what happened to the world’s greatest orator
James Taranto wants to know what happened to Obama, the world’s greatest orator. He concludes that the notion was always an empty myth, and that Obama never has convinced anyone of anything:
…[I]f Obama is following popular sentiment, he certainly isn’t leading it. And has he ever managed to do that?…True, Obama was persuasive enough to get elected president–but that was with a hapless opponent, a dour nepotist as his intraparty rival, a public fed up with the other party, and a media-driven cult of personality.
Part of that cult of personality is the myth that he is the World’s Greatest Orator, a myth the Times evokes with its hazy recollections of times when he was “highly persuasive.” When was he highly persuasive? When he sold the public on the so-called stimulus and ObamaCare? When he campaigned for Democrats in 2010? When he rallied public support for his last change in Afghan policy, an increase in the U.S. troop presence?
The truth is, there’s an Emperor’s New Clothes aspect to Obama’s supposed status as the World’s Greatest Orator. We’ve heard the myth of his eloquence over and over, yet he keeps “unexpectedly” making gaffes or tin-eared statements.
All of this is true—at least, since Obama has become president, a hint of it beginning quite early with his curiously flat inaugural speech. And it has continued, with Obama being an especially poor speaker and prone to gaffes when he departs from his notes (as he did the other day).
I’m on record as saying that Obama has always seemed like a poor speaker to me. Even when he was on the campaign trail, his speeches were loaded with platitudes, self-aggrandizement, and promises (both vague and specific) that he was unlikely to be able to fulfill. But it was very clear that they did persuade a great many people—to believe in him, that is. So in some sense, at least back then, Obama was a great orator if you measure such things (as Taranto seems to be doing in his piece) by the ability to persuade.
This was not just media hype, either. Enthusiasm for Obama affected a great many people, including a number of my friends who are ordinarily not very politically oriented. This affect Obama’s oratory had on many people was present as early as his address at the Democratic Convention of 2004, and probably even earlier, since the evidence is that he’d been regarded for most of his life as a person of spectacular promise who could and should be president some day, although his actual accomplishments were not all that great.
There’s a theory that’s been around for quite some time that Obama uses hypnosis in his speeches. If so (and I’ll leave it to you to make your own judgment on that), I submit that he’s lost that ability. Whether or not he ever was consciously employing hypnotic techniques, I submit that whatever persuasive skills he did have (and he certainly had them) rested on an edifice of believe in the power of Obama himself. For reasons that were not particularly rational, hearers felt that due to characteristics they perceived and/or imagined the man possessed (fill in the blank: intelligence, reasonableness, post-racial harmony, persuasive powers over even our enemies) he would be a highly successful president.
It all rested in belief in his nearly-unlimited potential—a potential that at the time was almost totally untested. Obama himself shared that belief in his own magical powers, perhaps more than any listener, and it enabled him to deliver his famous stump speech with incredible conviction and chutzpah, which in turn had a powerful effect on those listeners inclined to believe—and their number was legion.
This effect could not survive too much scrutiny in the real world, unless Obama had managed to deliver the goods. To a certain extent, no one could have delivered the fabulous goods he promised. But Obama hasn’t even come close, and therefore his oratory is falling flat—both his own belief in his powers, and the belief of listeners in those powers. Once those go it’s like Dumbo’s feather, and he falls flat (in Obama’s case, metaphorically rather than physically).
That’s not to say that Obama has suddenly become humble; he has not, not by a longshot. But his abilities in the rhetorical arena are probably never going to be what they once were.
After 2-1/2 years at the party, are people just now –FINALLY– starting to wake up and acknowledge the hangover?
The answer lies in a frequent rhetorical gambit that leftists throw at me when they disagree with me. It goes:
I can’t possibly talk to you. If you had any intention of being rational…”
You see, rational, to a leftist equals agreeing with them.
So, Obama’s banal verities strike the leftist as being incredibly acute and rational because he agrees with the basic assumptions.
And, he’s black. Well, not really.
Obama’s origins are extraordinarily attractive to the far left because, although he’s sold himself as black, he’s something entirely different.
He’s a Red Diaper baby, raised by a commie world saving mother, who slept with and was abandoned by a firebreathing, radical black activist (from Africa!).
Obama’s brilliance is precisely in this: He mouths all the standard “rational” leftist cliches, and he’s a member of the inner circle of the extreme left. His genesis is a wet dream of the radical left.
When Obama recently made that quick ironic remark about how shovel-ready jobs weren’t really shovel-ready, I felt real panic. It was one of those moments when the mask slips. He realizes what a disaster his presidency has been, and he looks at it with utter cynicism and a stoner’s detachment.
Have I been hearing too much of one side of this story, or are we really in terrible trouble?
The President is a reasonably skilled public speaker. Compared to professionals, though, he’s very average. As an extemporaneous speaker, he’s quite poor, even by Washington DC standards.
I have no idea how much of his text he writes himself, but it’s uniformly dreck. The rhetoric is consistently sophmoric, and the ideas are gassy, cliched, and ofte childish.
He is charismatic, though–no persuasion necessary. Shamefylly, that was enought o get him elected.
mizpants:
I think we’re really in terrible trouble, and I’ve thought so for a long time.
Obama is(was) The mirror or Erised. His speeches were always fill-in-the-blank. I recall listening to him talk on PBS about gun control. He said something that superficially sounded reasonable and well thought out but wasn’t on deeper inspection. He believed there is an individual right but that government can place reasonable controls/regulations. So in one sentence he could appeal to the pro-gun groups because who wants 6 year-olds buying guns, and to the anti-gun group because guns are dangerous and should be strongly restricted if not eliminate. Both reasonable regulations according to their supporters.
It is when he has to actually make a decision that the curtain is drawn back on the wizard. At that point Schré¶dinger’s cat can no longer be half-dead and half-alive. (Mixing metaphors)
President Obama is quite skilled at appealing to both sides of an issue, and leaving both sides convinced that he’s one of them.
It’s a useful skill for someone who only needs to talk, and never has to actually do anything. (As such, he was reasonably successful as a legislator, who really has nothing to contribute other than his voice and his votes.)
This is related to a common rhetorical device of his: “Some say [insert extreme-sounding straw-man here]; others may say [insert diametrically-opposite extreme-sounding straw-man here]. But I say…” Again, he’s using the slippery power of words to make what he says sound reasonable to whomever is listening.
I’ve long wondered where he learned to do this. You see, scholars of the Koran often do this as well — and we do know that, as a boy, he was a serious student of the Koran.
(The Koran, like nearly any religious text, is not very self-consistent. In the Old Testament, for example, you can read “Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery” and preach on that, or you can read selectively from the story of David and Bathsheba, and point out how revered David was. And in the Koran, you can read, if you like, about Muhammad’s early friendly treatment of Jews, and use that as a model. Or you can quote “The hour will not [come] until the Muslims fight Jews, until the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees and the rocks and trees [say], ‘O Muslim, O slave of Allah, a Jew hides behind me, come kill him’, except for the Gharqad tree, for it is the tree of the Jews” (41:6985). Either way you have the Koran behind you.)
Obviously, he could have learned this elsewhere. But I wonder.
respectfully,
Daniel in Brookline
The notion that policies or logical exposition have a large effect on elections is way overblown. Elections are attitudinal for the most part.
[off-topic alert]
On the subject of that Gharqad tree, by the way, it seems to correspond to the boxthorn. (Why that should be the tree of the Jews is completely beyond me.)
I remember once listening to Glenn Beck reading that particular surah on the air, though. He said meditatively, “I wonder what the Gharqad is supposed to be, that protects Jews hiding behind it. …maybe it’s us.”
As a Jew, I have to say that I was very moved.
I think Ann Coulter’s new book on the left being a demonic mob holds the key here.
Obama ginned up a giant mob of leftists using images and emotion, no intellect. All leftists have a deep yearning to belong to some mass political/social movement and suffer from some sort of hysteria disorder.
The content of O’s speeches show a weak mind with an incredibly good delivery; at least until one sees the act too often. After which delivery counts less than content.
Recall the story of the Athenian lawyer. An ancient Greek asked to read a defense his lawyer had prepared for him in some case. The first time he read it it seemed brilliant, the second time he read it he started to have reservations, the third time he read it he realized it was no defense at all.
His lawyer told him not to worry, the jury was only going to hear it once. We’ve been hearing the same defenses for years.
Early in the 2008 campaign, I began reading Obama’s speeches after listening to them. I always found that they seemed better when listening than when reading.
Mousebert @2:45 pm wrote ‘He said something that superficially sounded reasonable and well thought out but wasn’t on deeper inspection’.
This coincides with my conclusion that reading gave me the time to evaluate that listening did not.
Over time his speaking style, that I had at first responded positively to, has become boring to me–perhaps because it is so unchanging, no matter what the subject, or because I have grown accustomed to expect little of the content.
Best wishes,
Jim
I agree. Obama often (not always) used to sound good, but when has his rhetoric ever led to convincing the unconvinced?
I listened carefully to his campaign speech where he invoked the words of Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. among others and then used the phrase “just words.”
Now it was clear that the idea was to use “just words” ironically to imply the exact opposite, and this is exactly how the chattering class interpreted the phrase. When I listened to his delivery though, it sounded like he was saying the phrase “just words” to mean exactly that, i.e., these are only words. To me ther was a large disconecct between intended meaning and rhetorical delivery. It was at that point that I began asking the question “exactly why does everyone think he’s so intelligent?”
Baraq worshipped and learned oratory at the feet of a master, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, for 20 years. And applied those lessons while he was s community agitator, without any responsibility for outcomes. The Annenberg Challenge was play money to him and Ayers, $100 mill of OPM that they had been ’empowered’ (ugh, a hated word, like ‘celebrate’ and ’embrace’) to piss away, without any responsibility whatever.
That is the essence of his presidency. Playing at it, irresponsible and consequence-free.
Obama=Chavez, but unfortunately BHO does not yet have a pelvis full of pus.
those that were swayed are people who will think what they are told to think…
this is their way of appearing smart by being on the right side of any issue they can feel by which way the wind blows..
when propagandic media turns on the fan, they fall into line believing this is the way the real wind blows
as far as hypnosis, most use it.
and i have explained how it works.
and i am loath to do so again…
(arent you lucky vanderleun)
but the concepts and techniques of “split mind suggestibility” are well known.
two examples:
1) they ask a question, then the person prattles on never answering it but talking.
2) they tell you what to think before they tell you the information that thinking should be a reaction to
NLP concepts are used negatively. but they can work, if you know how they work.
the earliest example of NLP kinds of games is in the bible… genesis… the interaction of the serpent and eve…
the idea is to move the person to a new place… using various things learned from social engineering and other marxist ideas of population control.
dialoging to consensus is a version
so when they got up and they all started saying X, regardless of truth.. it was a form of group pressure on others, a form of dialoguign to consensus. ie, the ame way you would conspire in a meeting with a few freinds to seem like your making spontaneous actions, when your coordinated to appear cargo cult fashion.
a lot of it stems from the work of skinner.. and other researhers who would show that a person presented with information, will lie if the others in the room will lie.
very few people are dumb like me and cant pick up the cues, and so answer honestly, and dont bend when group pressure is applied
but self esteem addicts and people cliped of abilities are constantly trying to protect their egos, they like illiterates, come up with lots of behaviors to avoid the work but appear otherwise. (like reading the ny times book list).
when a person asks a question, your brain has to keep that question in mind constantly repeating it and comparing to whats being said. your mind is split… and so is maximally suggestible. (ever drive home and not remember the trip. thats split mind, hypnosis state).
oh.. and the SMARTER you are the MORE you are susceptable.. especially if your an academic today.. who has a crippled mind, narrow expertise, pacifist fear and obeyance, etc.
the bible example is in the speech of the serpent.
once you ‘get’ it… you can see it.
but if you dont, its invisible to you…
“There is no legal definition of hypnosis. Webster’s dictionary describes it incorrectly as an artificially induced sleep, but it is actually a natural state of mind and induced normally in everyday living much more often than it is induced artificially. Every time we become engrossed in a novel or a motion picture, we are in a natural hypnotic trance (p. 211-212). Charles Tebbetts,
there are various induction types..
Mental confusion methods are designed to confuse the conscious mind, so that it simply becomes easier to just relax and “let go” into hypnosis. Top hypnotists warn that hypnosis trainees should not attempt this type of induction until they understand it, and know what to do when a client enters hypnosis, as it is very powerful to the mind. This is an induction type employed by many “alternate agenda speakers”. These tares will highlight contradictory ideas to the listeners subconscious mind during a speech to make it easier to later breakdown their thinking.
Mental misdirection methods employ active use of the imagination, coupled with response, to hypnotize through responding to suggestions. This is a favorite of the Masons and Jesuits. The responses of certain groupings of people are investigated and recorded. If they know what outcome or end-thought they want to foster in the minds of their listeners/readers then they use this data to select the appropriate stimuli to obtain the desired result. People in each culture develop certain responses to common situations in the persuasion process. It is because of these responses to certain stimuli that make it possible to predict behavior and therefore persuade others. Unfortunately it is the same responses that make it possible to manipulate or be manipulated by unscrupulous individuals.
think of obama telling folksy stories before talking about something. shout outs… etc.
another term for this process when he soviets exported it to us was “conciousness raising”
“Opinion is ultimately determined by the feelings, not the intellect.” –Herbert Spencer
The trained “manipulator” works on your emotions as well as your intellect. A person’s feeling’s are much more powerful than academic thought processes. After the repeated mental raping of the mind, anyone can begin to lose ground to these subtle influences. The subject (one who receives the hypnotic suggestions) can begin to question things he or she “used to know”.
feminism did it… how powerful is it?
it is powerfulenough to get a mom, who under normal situations will stand between her child and a bear to protect it..
consider it to be positive and good to take that same child, and leave it for 8 hours with a unskilled person with no supervision for minimum wage – AND BELIEVE ITS NOT ONLY NOT HARMFUL BUT MORE POSITIVE THAN HETERO-NORMATIVE…
heck… with such things you can make pamplets and give them out to kids on how fun and loving anal fisting is… (thanks GSLEN)
or maybe convince a population in isolation that living human sacrifice is great… (reinforced by the supesitions mechanisms as exposed by skinner)
hey… over time, and incrementally, you can even convince women that they are liberted if they exterminate their genetic lineage.. or that they shouldnt have to have babies because men dont..
there are other equally inane normalized things… but like the stanford experment by joseph zimbardo, the isolated group, has no way to get out of the bind until some external force wakes them.
ie… absent an external force or refernce, they continue on and think its normal, and have a hard time stepping back and seeing it.
maslow found that there is a small group that is not like this… but since he coined the term, the social cargo cultists have adopted it to describe themselves when they most definitely are NOT that.
self actualized… he said that they were able to show him that things he though were perfectly normal and ok, were definitely not..
if you diversify maximally everywhere, then you are not diversifying, your homogenizing…
but they say otherwise, and so we believe otherwise.
take social engineering..
tell me what the difference between joseph mengele who tried to improve children against their will for a better society…
and any social scientist today petitioning for control laws, or some pedagogy… who is tryig to improve the children against their will for a better society
the only difference is that one is in english and othe other in german… and both are following the SAME IDEOLOGY informing them that doing this to children is the right thing.
who defines better?
whoever has control, and so imposes their arbitrary aesthetic…
so you get the weirdness mapped over the system. which is why the same ideology implemented by hitler, mao, stalin, appear different..
like musicians playing variations on twinkle twinkle little star… its the same core… with their flourishes.. the problem is when you find out that flourishes were core…
But his abilities in the rhetorical arena are probably never going to be what they once were.
needs correcting..
But his abilities in the rhetorical arena are probably never going to be what they never were.
I’m just wondering how Obama will react when he notices that his speeches are producing yawns from former friends and when said friends start questioning him on content as WaPo did today on the oil release. Will he turn nasty and snipey? Will that cool demeanor heat up? He may end up exposing his lack of character and of grace, and that may be his downfall.
On the subject of that Gharqad tree, by the way, it seems to correspond to the boxthorn. (Why that should be the tree of the Jews is completely beyond me.)
because the Jewish messiah Jesus, had a crown of thorns placed on his head…
and
“Coronavit eum noverca sua corona spinea.” St. Bernard
another aspect is that every tree is known by its fruit…
lots of stuff related to this.
and in judaism, it becomes more symbolic… in a way that most christians have no idea of…
when pontious pilate told jesus to turn my water in to wine, its not cause he wanted to imbibe alchol…
in jewish view, water, wine, and oil have specific meanings as do vessels, and such… where the christians generlly have no idea…
so pontious pilate was saying… talk to me, make me a believer, convert me… change my soul empty of faith and god… into wine… full of the fruit of the lord.
the secular people opposing the church stretch and do things to make this silly… a form of NLP… (so was a lot of saulalinsky stuff).
the bible teaches how to aviod nlp.. its in the speech between eve and the serpent who asks open ended questions toplant ideas to move eve… (and even shows that to get to the man who is faithful, you only have to turn his wife… she is more ‘fluid’)
here is another thing from the bible that if reasoned carefully, stops being silly.
and noah collected the animals…
right… and the secular says.. he cant do that toall the animals in the world.. and on it goes.
but if you think of the age of the bible… the start of human civilization..
and that it started after they stopped being nomads walking the desert… by domnestication and farming.
maybe, the animals were the first domesticated animals… the wild animals need no saving..
but noah being wise, Saved the domesticated animals, and so saved human society.
[recent archeological findings have caused a uproar!]
play with beliefs, to avoid debate
Artfldgr: there are some gems in your long post above, as usual. But why should we pan for them as for gold in streambed gravel, when you have already done so, only to offer them up to us in gravel again?
Give us the glitter, man, and spare us the dross. We will be grateful.
How far has he fallen? I just bought Dreams From My Father for a dollar. Not a penny of which will go to the POTUS’s bank account. No royalties on used books.
not sure which is dross and which is metal
how much others know, how much they dont
what parts i can leave out, or when i do, which become vague
🙁
Artfldgr, perhaps you should ask yourself, “If I had to confine myself to 100-200 words, what would I write?”
What you right is good, but many of us do not have the patience for long discourses.
Well, as I’ve said before, I have no complaints about Artfldgr’s comments. Art, you bring much of value to this site, and I’m glad you comment here.
Sometimes I read them, sometimes I don’t, and sometimes I just skim. It’s a matter of individual choice.
It doesn’t cost anything to use the “page down” button, so I don’t understand all the complaints.
Artfgr—Brilliant food for thought. I’ll be re reading your post several times. Its too profound and complex to absorb it in one read.
But there is another interesting skill which might be called discernment. The ability to know without observable facts that something is off, or evil. My discernment radar went off the first time I witnessed Bill Clinton, Master Sociopathic Narcissist try to convince us he was for real. That same radar went off the second time I saw Obama speak.
I believe Neurolinguistic Programming is fascinating stuff, but it does not take in the ability to read the energy behind the words.
James Taranto wonders what happened to the world’s greatest orator
Every balloon eventually finds its pin.
“Will he turn nasty and snipey?”
Is the Pope Catholic? (Or as the commercial for the new Cars movie says: Is the Popemobile Catholic?)
I enjoyed this link from Iowahawk.
A Special Message from Barack Obama’s Teleprompter
It’s two and a half years old but who would know? It shows that Obama has always been overrated as a speaker. Can you imagine him on that pile of rubble instead of George W. Bush? It would have been a massacre of the time and place and the English language. He can’t do unscripted.
I think Ann Coulter is right. There is a demonic factor here at work in the “mob”.
Obama is not our main problem. He is a huge and amazing problem. He is titanic in his ability to cause harm. But he is still not the main problem.
The Leviathan-in -the Room is the people who voted for him. They are the problem we may never solve and which may doom our nation.
We have, in America, a parasite class, and an aggrieved and opportunistic class. We have, in short, a class of tyrants and totalitarians.
We call the Democrats. They live next door. The consider themselves to be the best of people; the most refined people with the most beautiful sensitivities.
They are, on the contrary, Orcs of the demonic horde.
They will devour us; or we will defeat them. And there is no third option. Not anymore.
Victory will be total. One way or the other.
My take is that people wanted to vote for Obama because of what he was (a black guy, a Democrat after 8 years of GWB, something new under the sun). Then the little hamsters in their heads scurried to come up with reasons to justify this choice. Couldn’t point to any accomplishments, so they decided he was a Great Orator. It’s plausible — he’s black, after all, and many black politicians are good speakers. They also convinced themselves he’s smart, with no evidence to support that conjecture.
I distinctly remember one of my Democrat friends telling me he was voting for O because of the harm Bush’s deficit spending was doing, jacking up the national debt and putting the economy in jeopardy.
Liberalism is a mental illness.
No shock that I never found Obama an orator of note, with regard to persuasiveness or anything else.
His speeches were simply cheap rhetorical tricks, larded with (as neo aptly put it) platitudes and utopian fantasies. Paint-by-numbers stuff. The most remarkable thing is not the speeches or the way he made them, but the effect they had.
Therein I think is the answer to the question, “Whatever happened to the great orator?” Nothing happened. He was always like this. But he did manage once upon a time to mesmerize people. It’s just that it wasn’t principally his words, in themselves, that did so.
It was first and foremost, as others have mentioned, the fact that he was “black.” (I cannot resist citing here a funny but true observation from Christian Lander, proprietor of the Stuff White People Like website, who in his recently published collection referred to Obama as “the first truly white President we’ve ever had.”)
I can’t imagine how anyone could doubt the supreme relevance of that. Imagine John Edwards (or Hillary Clinton) giving the speeches Obama gave once upon a time. Would they have won the Presidency in 2008? Sure, it’s possible. Would the left have loved them? Of course. But would all of the slobbering and sycophancy and hagiographic effusions, the sheer infantile emotional derangement (people acting like weeping teens at a Justin Bieber concert), have been as gushing and ubiquitous as they were? Absolutely not.
The secondary reason is that Obama was a man who briefly met a moment in our politics. The people were ready to crack, and the pressures and nastiness of the Bush years had left most people exhausted (Hell, I was exhausted). Whatever it was, we became convinced that we just needed to take a chill pill and “heal.” We wanted a therapist, not an Executive. Obame being “black” was not the least important of the therapies he offered, but once that hook was in, all the other followed: he was pleasant, calm, not bitter, apparently optimistic, not Texan, urban, cool, laid-back, smart, etc., etc.
He represented what was perceived to be the antithesis of “Bush,” with all of the connotations that name and its eponymous era came to have.
In any case, I’ve never thought his speeches per se, or his manner of speaking them, had that much to do with his “persuasiveness.” He was a phenomenon, an event, not a true captain of the ship of state. He happened, more than he made anything happen.
As other have noted, BHO was never the grand orator. For many he was/is the blank slate of their longing for something new and exciting. Millions swooned for BHO because they were told by the MSM that he was a transcendent messiah who would heal the wounds of partisanship, stop the rising of the seas, and so forth. And, then there was Bush fatigue, the economic tailspin, and McCain. And finally, millions of voters wanted to prove to themselves they were not racist.
All anyone had to do was look at his record in the Illinois senate, his past associations, and read his books to know he was not the great post racial uniter. BHO has always been a stiffly animated puppet stuffed with leftist dogma for brains. I would view him as a sad and pitiful Gollum were the Oval Office not his preciousssss.
Artfldgr:
“very few people are dumb like me and cant pick up the cues, and so answer honestly, and dont bend when group pressure is applied”
🙂 That’s not dumbness, its honest nakedness. More power to you.
“when propagandic media turns on the fan, they fall into line believing this is the way the real wind blows”
Now you’re channeling Robert Allen Zimmerman. 😉
Years later, I still think that this cartoon is the iconic one for the whole Obama phenomenon. It seemed spot-on when I saw it in early 2008, and it seems as accurate a critique of his voters and supporters now.
Mike Mc is right to say that the people who voted for him are the larger problem in our society. Even with the nightmare that is the Obama economy, young voters may have lost some of their enthusiasm for Obama, but the majority still support him: it will be years before many of them outgrow the years of leftist indoctrination of their school years–assuming that they ever do.
I agree. I never thought that he was a good speaker, and never understood why anyone would think that he was a good speaker. Hypnosis? Not deliberately. However, there is no doubt that people were under some sort of hysterical trance.
He was a fad, and now he has to learn to become a leader, and it’s not pretty.
Were there signs of who found Obama convincing? Hey i can’t sleep so i’ll give it a shot.
1. If you’d ever teared up during an infomercial testimonial.
2. If you were never told as a kid to sit down and STFU.
3. If there is no one with more stuff than you that deserved it because of superior efforts.
4. If you think last place teams deserve a trophy too.
5. If you sometimes feel guilty that you eat dead plants and animals.
6. If you think people are a threat to the planet now and will soon threaten the solar system and milky way galaxy if left free and unsupervised.
7. If you think yourself educated but can’t change a tire.
8. If you think healthcare run like the DMV is much needed progress.
9. If you think communism can’t be bad because it sounds like the word community.
Mike Mc. & Kurt:
Your comments reminded me of this classic quote:
While looking it up, I got curious about where it originated. I just spent two hours trying to track it down and came up empty-handed. About the only thing I can say for certain is that it did not come from a Czech newspaper, as is widely claimed. I was able to trace it as far back as Jan. 6, 2010, but it was evidently already making the e-mail rounds at that time. It’s not only a great quote, it’s also a great mystery.
I only hope it doesn’t become America’s epitaph.
Years ago, my best friend and I found ourselves in a situation where we were being driven over country roads by a seriously drunk driver. I’d mercifully forgotten about it until recently when I began to reach for some metaphor to illustrate how I feel about being a citizen of the U.S.A. with O as President.
Steven Den Beste wrote a column shortly after Obama won the election, and he was eerily prescient. The piece can be accessed at the archives at his web site: chizumatic.mee.nu. I believe that the piece was written around November 6-8, 2008. It’s worth a read.
RPL:
I’d like to read that. I was a big USS Clueless fan once upon a time. Can you provide a link to the article? I don’t see any way to access the archives, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to click backwards through 363 pages one at a time.
I happened to be in our local Borders yesterday and there on the bargain racks was a boxed set of “The World’s Greatest Speeches”–a combined book and DVD set–and what did they highlight on the cover of this set as some of those “World’s Greatest Speeches”?
Why, there were speeches by Churchill, speeches by FDR, MLK, and speeches by Obama.
Unless you were really deep into the Koolaid I’d imagine that a few minutes of listening to Churchill or FDR, or MLK speak and then listening to Obama speak would illustrate just how Lilliputian are Obama’s talents as an orator; a very effective demagogue yes, but a great orator no.
RPL: Is this the piece you were referring to? It appeared on election day.
People who loved BO were simply in love with their own projections. They wanted to believe he was a brilliant speaker, so he was.
For an effective persuasive speaker, look at Reagan. He took office with Democrats running Congress and a monolithic left running the news media, Hollywood, and the academy. There was no talk radio or internet to offer people an alternative to left-wing spin. Yet, despite constant ridicule, fearmongering, and the rest of the Alinsky playbook, Reagan succeeded in persuading the American people to follow his lead on the economy and foreign policy. And proved he was right.
Wolla Dalbo, are you sure that the speeches of FDR and churchill were not being recited by obama too? 🙂
Kurt, that’s the one. Rickl, Kurt has provided the link. Thank you!
Artfldgr Said:”In Genesis 22, God asks Abraham to sacrifice his only son, Isaac.”
Only son? What about Ishmael? According to the Koran Abraham took his son, and that is interpreted to be Ishmael. Ishmael was older but Isaac was the son of Sarah, the primary wife. So Isaac, by some, is considered the eldest legal son for inheritance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishmael
Artfldgr–I doubt that way over his “level of competence” Obama could even manage to do a half way decent job of reading most of those speeches.
The guy is a very shrewd, very badly educated but slick talking con artist who played the system for all it was worth–having played it so often, I’m surprised his racism card hasn’t had all the symbols worn off it by now–and picked up Ivy League degrees that he was very obviously not entitled to, nor–it seems–worked all that hard for.
Thus, the lack of more than a handful of fellow students from college, grad, and law schools combined who even remember him, much less have come forward to reminisce at great length and detail about their days together of hard study in Academe.
Great orator? Ha! The problem is that not enough liberal white folks have ever heard on-fire-with-the-Spirit black Christian preacher, or they’d have recognized the what Barack was ATTEMPTING. He is a man of little significance or ability, raised to a position far over his paygrade. Incidentally, one of my mentors had Mr. Obama’s number just a few months after his election; she dubbed him “the Trifling President” (as a play on “Teflon President”). Trifling he is.
As for the young voters, I think they haven’t been indoctrinated by their schooling but by their families. All the volunteers for his campaign that I met in my area were generally from well-off or well-subsidized families who could afford to take an unpaid job without endangering their bank accounts or their welfare status. (BTW I have always found it telling that the wealthy liberals I’ve met are asset-wealthy, which means they don’t mind tax increases on income, as they or their ancestors paid taxes on the principal long ago. )
SteveH:
Back in early ’08, I wrote in the Althouse comments’ section:
“We used to breed horses and there was always such excitement and optimism about the possibilities of the foal. So, when I see all the enthusiam that Obama generates simply by being, I jokingly refer to him as “the foal”. He’s a repository for hopes and dreams and isn’t so far along that you have to admit this creation isn’t going to pan out like you’d hoped.”
Well, the foal has matured enough so that, hopefully in Nov. 2012, enough people will realize he’s not a mount worth keeping.
Update on Chavez: in ‘critical condition’ in the Cuban healthcare paradise. One can but hope.
There is some Venezuelan chatter that he may have prostate cancer, but that doesn’t cause a pelvic abcess. A colonic perforation would. Who knows? At least he’s ‘critical’.
As I’ve said before, Obama has a sonorous voice which he uses to mouth platitudes, half-truths, prevarications, and mealy-mouthed b.s., the sum of which passes for oratory these days. Listen to a Churchill speech (and read the transcript) if you want to know what the gold standard is.
Parker hits the nail on the head:
“Millions swooned for BHO because they were told by the MSM that he was a transcendent messiah who would heal the wounds of partisanship, stop the rising of the seas, and so forth”
While some in the media were themselves caught up in the cult, we now have proof that the effort to sell Obama was mutually coordinated by people in the media intending to deceive the electorate. A large chunk of the people who bought that message are no longer deceived and have lost any trust in the MSM.
Obama’s oratory has not changed, his audience has caught on and look behind the words to see the truth for themselves.
Obama has a GREAT SOUNDING voice — it sounds like a Hollywood generation thinks a president should sound like.
as above: “Obama has a sonorous voice which he uses to mouth platitudes, half-truths, prevarications, and mealy-mouthed b.s., the sum of which passes for oratory these days.
It passes for oratory because it sounds good.
Reps should all continue talking about how good the sound quality of his voice is, but how terrible his policies are; and how often he has been dishonest/ wrong about what his great sounding voice says.