What’s behind Obama’s Teleprompter addiction?

The New Neo Posted on by

President Obama’s Teleprompter dependence has become so extreme that the little gadget has decided to enter the blogosphere with its own tell-all story.

Yes, it’s good for a joke or two. But more serious discussion of the Teleprompter reliance of our new Orator-in-Chief mostly focuses on the irony and apparent contradiction that a president known for being an articulate graduate of Harvard Law School, and for the soaring rhetoric of his inspiring oratory, appears remarkably tongue-tied and awkward without his trusty Telly.

Of course it’s always been known that speechmaking, in contrast with the more spontaneous give-and-take of debate or press conferences, is a very different beast. For example, John McCain (remember him?) was far better at the latter than the former—that is, until he became candidate McCain in 2008, at which point he started resembling his predecessor George Bush and was rather mediocre at both. It was also clear from the Obama campaign that we knew only a tiny bit about his off-the-cuff speaking, because almost all of his interviews were softball puffery.

But what we did know was troubling; many on the Right pointed out that Obama stammered and hesitated, and seemed to be almost a different person, without his script.

Obama himself seems to be aware of the disparity. His attempt to deal with it has been this over-reliance on the Teleprompter to help overcome his disfluency when speaking extemporaneously. It makes sense; after all, why stammer and stumble when you can sound smooth?

The late great Dean Barnett was one of the first to not only notice this but to understand what it might signify besides a simple desire for fluency. Writing in February 2008 about a speech Obama had made a few days earlier, Barnett shrewdly observed [emphasis mine]:

As he strode to the podium, Obama clutched in his hands a pile of 3 by 5 index cards. The index cards meant only one thing–no Teleprompter.

Shorn of his Teleprompter, we saw a different Obama. His delivery was halting and unsure. He looked down at his obviously copious notes every few seconds throughout the speech. Unlike the typical Obama oration where the words flow with unparalleled fluidity, he stumbled over his phrasing repeatedly.

The prepared text for his remarks, as released on his website, sounded a lot like a typical Obama speech….The prepared text reached out to all Americans, including (gasp!) Republicans. It also evidenced Obama’s signature lack of anger…[and] loftier tone…

But…[w]ith no Teleprompter signaling the prepared text, Obama failed to deliver the speech in his characteristically flawless fashion. He had to rely on notes. And his memory. And he improvised…

Virtually every time Obama deviated from the text, he expressed the partisan anger that has so poisoned the Democratic party. His spontaneous comments eschewed the conciliatory and optimistic tone that has made the Obama campaign such a phenomenon…[T]his different Obama was a far less attractive one…

Barnett noticed—as many had, even at the time—the enormous difference in articulateness between Teleprompter-Obama and Obama unplugged (the latter is the title of Barnett’s article). That was the easy part. The more discriminating observation Barnett made was between the message of Teleprompter Obama and the message of ad-lib Obama. The two were not just different in degree—they were profoundly opposite in tone and essence. Ad-lib Obama was far more angry and more radical—indeed, although Barnett doesn’t mention it, this Obama resembled the angrier and more radical Michelle Obama, in her earlier campaign remarks that drew so much controversy.

Obama is addicted to his Teleprompter not only because he knows he sounds better—smoother and smarter—with it than without. The deeper reason for his reliance on it may just be that he differs so profoundly from the persona he wishes to convey that he quite literally cannot trust himself to speak without it. Shorn of the Teleprompter, he not only runs the risk of revealing a disfluency that could rival (or even exceed?) that of his reviled predecessor George Bush—he may reveal who he truly is, an angry man with a profoundly radical agenda for America.

That agenda (although not the anger) emerged just a bit when he was being questioned by Joe the Plumber during the campaign (the anger came later, when Obama mocked Joe). Obama’s “spread the wealth” remark to Joe was a tiny slip of the careful campaign mask, a moment when just a dab of Obama’s far Left leanings oozed out through an unguarded crack. Now that Obama is president, he has revealed more of those inclinations, but he is doing so in a calibrated and orchestrated manner that is calculated (he hopes) to soothe any alarm most Americans might feel.

All leaders rehearse and prepare their speeches. Churchill, as I recall from the wonderful William Manchester biographies of him (one of which appears in the photo at the top of my blog page), prepared his public addresses down to the tone and gestures, even writing notes to himself as to when to seem to hesitate and when to stammer. But that was theater, designed to accentuate who and what he already was and had been known to be for decades. Churchill’s private and public selves were congruent, as well as his brilliance in both scripted and extemporaneous speaking and debate.

I’m not expecting Obama to be Churchill. But Obama’s oratorical hyper-control, unlike Churchill’s, is in the service of hiding rather than revealing the essential self. All really good orators know how to milk a crowd, and even to use suggestive gestures that border on mass hypnosis. But Obama’s exercise of such things is extreme, and he just may be offering us the fewest non-scripted public utterances of any leader in America’s modern history.

The reason for this is not merely his attempt to appear more articulate than he actually is. In his endeavor to exercise such tight control over his words, Obama seems to be presenting the most studied and manipulative (in the sense of saying one thing and intending another, and/or using doublespeak, as I outlined in yesterday’s post) message of any president in our history. This is profoundly disturbing.

Obama gives a master class in shucking responsibility while simultaneously pretending to accept it

The New Neo Posted on by

I’d hardly gotten through lamenting the fact that Obama is a champion blamer of others—no “The Buck Stops Here” sign on his desk—when what do you know, right on cue, he comes out with “I’ll take responsibility. I’m the President.”

Sounds good, doesn’t it? Until you stop and think about it for a moment—which he’s counting on most Americans to fail to do.

Let’s take a closer look at what Obama said concerning the AIG bonuses:

“Washington is all in a tizzy and everybody is pointing fingers at each other and saying it’s their fault, the Democrats’ fault, the Republicans’ fault,” [Obama] said at a town hall meeting Wednesday. “Listen, I’ll take responsibility. I’m the President.”

He also makes clear that it isn’t really his fault. “We didn’t grant these contracts,” he said.

But he added: “So for everybody in Washington who’s busy scrambling, trying to figure out how to blame somebody else, just go ahead and talk to me, because it’s my job to make sure that we fix these messes, even if I don’t make them.”

Note that nowhere does he admit any wrongdoing or culpability. The clues are in the little details of language; do not think for a moment that they are accidental. Obama’s ability to craft his balancing act is so precise that it has me in awe. Almost every word he utters is there for a careful strategic reason, to induce a particular psychological effect in the listener.

First we have “Washington is all in a tizzy.” That is a favorite ploy of Obama’s—to ridicule and trivialize criticism (last April, for example, I wrote about his tendency to use the word “silly” to describe his opposition).

Note also it is Washington that’s in this tizzy of blame, not the American people. That’s because Obama knows that “Washington” isn’t very popular right now (or perhaps ever), so it makes a good target. And Obama, of course, isn’t “Washington,” although he happens to reside there.

He doesn’t even consider the possibility that anyone in “Washington” (except, of course, for Obama, who’s not really “in” Washington) might be sincerely trying to discover who is actually responsible for the problem. No, they are merely eager to deflect the responsibility onto others. The fact that this is actually a pretty good description of the motivation of so many members of Congress only adds to Obama’s believability, so one might be pardoned for forgetting that Obama has been doing the very same thing—pointing the finger at others and saying it’s their fault, not his—ever since he came to office.

Next we have the phrase “saying it’s their fault, the Democrats’ fault, the Republicans’ fault…” Notice what Obama leaves out here—the phrase “saying it’s my fault,” or even the more distant third-person “saying it’s the President’s fault.” He refuses to add those words because he doesn’t even want to admit it as a possibility. He doesn’t want to leave that image in people’s minds even for a moment.

Then Obama says, “I’ll take responsibility.” Not “I am responsible.” Just that he’ll “take” responsibility. He’ll wrap the mantle of responsibility around his shoulders whether it fits or not. That’s just how noble he is. And not because he’s done anything wrong, of course. It’s because presidents are supposed to be big boys and do that sort of thing.

Obama drives this thought home by immediately adding “I’m the President.” He wants to remind us of the dignity of his office, and the fact that he holds it and wields power right now.

But Obama saves the best for last. It’s astounding how he manages to pack so much into one sentence. He repeats his earlier ridicule of Washington for emphasis: “everybody in Washington who’s busy scrambling, trying to figure out how to blame somebody else.” Once again we have an image of a pack of clowns or Keystone cops, a comedy routine of fools, refusing to take the responsibility that is rightly theirs and saying “he did it; she did it; not me!”

Everyone, that is, but the righteous Obama. In contrast he says, “just go ahead and talk to me, because it’s my job to make sure that we fix these messes, even if I don’t make them.” So once again we have the contrast of the silly Washington blamers (whom he is blaming for being blamers), followed immediately by a reminder of his high office (“it’s my job to fix”) and then the kicker, a disclaimer of wrongdoing: “even if I don’t make them.” That last is slipped in so smoothly that the audience might easily miss the fact that he just negated the responsibility he had claimed to be taking only a moment before.

But in actuality he is just appearing to negate that responsibility that he claimed to be taking a moment earlier. I know that’s a bit complex and convoluted (Obama is nothing if not complex and convoluted), but please bear with me. The tipoff is his use of the word “if.” He is careful not to say whether he made this mess or didn’t, or whether he had any role in its genesis at all. He is saying that, whether he did or did not make this mess (and who knows which it might be?), he is going to take responsibility for it anyway—a responsibility which he has just subtly deflected.

I wrote this analysis without having seen a video of his remarks. But when I watched them just now, the visuals made even clearer what he was doing.

The remarks in question begin at minute 4:46:

Note his gestures and affect. When he says the bits about “tizzy” and “scrambling” the intent to mock is obvious; he waves his arms in a flapping motion both times. Then, when he is making the contrasting remarks that follow, about his own position of power and gravitas as the President, his aspect grows more serious and responsible, and he underscores the effect by placing his hand solemnly on his chest each time, just in case we missed it, indicating: “I am the President. Me. Me.”

[NOTE: Lest you think any of this “now I say it now I don’t” language was an accident, Obama uttered similar although not identical double talk while answering press questions prior to the Town Hall meeting. When asked whether he wished he’d learned about the AIG bonuses sooner so he could have done something about them, he dodges the question and instead says:

Well, look, rather than going into sort of the details of finding it out, ultimately I’m responsible, I’m the President of the United States. We’ve got a big mess that we’re having to clean up. Nobody here drafted those contracts. Nobody here was responsible for supervising AIG and allowing themselves to put the economy at risk by some of the outrageous behavior that they were engaged in. We are responsible, though. The buck stops with me. And my goal is to make sure that we never put ourselves in this kind of position again.

See also my April 2008 dissection of Obama’s non-apologetic apologies.]

His name is Inigo Montoya—prepare to watch

The New Neo Posted on by

I was fiddling around at You Tube the other night, and came across these classics.

They reminded me how very much I’d enjoyed Mandy Patinkin’s performance in “The Princess Bride.” It was a good movie with an excellent script. But it was Patinkin’s humor crossed with intensity as the determined and relentless Montoya that really made the film for me. In a part that might have been ludicrous in anyone else’s hands, he was fanciful and believable, lovable and obsessed, all at the same time

So here you are, and here he is:

Bye-Bye bipartisanship

The New Neo Posted on by

Jay Cost is worried about Obama’s lack of bipartisanship:

I am worried because I thought partisan reconciliation was an animating force of Obama’s candidacy, a big reason why he thought he—rather than one of the 306 million other Americans—should be President. I am worried that, amidst a credit crisis, two wars, and a lack of confidence in our nation’s institutions, we have installed as President a man apparently willing to abandon a foundational premise of his candidacy not three months into his tenure.

We should all be worried.

But where was Cost when Obama abandoned one of the fundamental premises of his candidacy when he was still a candidate? I’m talking about his broken campaign financing pledge way back in June of 2008. It exposed Obama not only as a hypocrite, but as a pass-the-buck hypocrite as well.

I wrote back then:

…Obama’s been running as the business-as-unusual candidate, not just another hypocritical, lying pol who, as Obama’s former mentor the Rev. Wright said, “does what politicians do.” And yet as soon as Obama saw that the money flowing his way was far beyond what he could get if he adhered to his agreement, he reneged.

It’s not just that he reneged, either”“it’s how he reneged. Who’s to blame, according to Obama? Why, John McCain and the nasty Republicans, that’s who. James Joyner writes that this charge of Obama’s does take “a bit of gall.” I’d say it takes substantially more than a bit, as well as a heavy dose of the whining, blaming, audacity in which the holier-than-thou Obama tends to specialize…

This move, more than any other, was the tipoff as to what sort of politician Obama was and is. Many American voters ignored the facts that were staring them in the face, hoping against audacious hope that Obama’s words were what he really meant, rather than his acts. But it doesn’t usually work that way, does it?

Oh, and should anyone on earth be surprised that this flagrant violation of bipartisanship is being considered in a move to force Obama’s energy and health initiatives down the already-engorged throats of the American people?

And it ain’t foie gras we’ll all be eating.

foie-gras.jpg

Senator Dodd didn’t write the bonus loopholes…

The New Neo Posted on by

…before he did write them.

Or maybe it’s the other way around.

It’s so dreadfully hard to keep it all straight, isn’t it? So it’s totally understandable that Senator Dodd might be a wee bit confused about what he did or didn’t do.

Either way, though, I’d say he’s in deep doodoo:

Dodd just admitted on CNN that he inserted a loophole in the stimulus legislation that allowed million-dollar bonuses to insurance giant AIG to go forward ”“ after previously denying any involvement in writing the controversial provision.

Science does jello

The New Neo Posted on by

Are you down and blue, and don’t know what to do?

It’s been a while since I last visited the happy world of jello (see my previous posts on the subject under the category “food”). But take heart—it’s jello time again at neo-neocon.

I thought I’d pretty much exhausted the jello archives at Google, searching for jello images to brighten your day. But here’s a new one:

greenjello.jpg

It’s from graphics artist and former computer science professor Paul Heckbert, whose jello-besotted page can be found here. It illustrated a study by Heckbert that appeared in 1987 in Computer Graphics magazine.

Here’s a sample of Heckbert’s instructions on how to create your own jello images in just a few easy lessons, for those of you who care:

To model static Jell-O ® we employ a new synthesis technique wherein attributes are added one at a time using abstract object-oriented classes we call ingredients. Ingredient attributes are combined during a preprocessing pass to accumulate the desired set of material properties (consistency, taste, torsional strength, flame resistance, refractive index, etc.). We use the RLS orthogonal basis (raspberry, lime, and strawberry), from which any type of Jell-O ® can be synthesized [Weller,1985]. Ingredients are propagated through a large 3-D lattice using vectorized pipeline SIMD parallel processing in a systolic array architecture which we call the Jell-O ® Engine. Furthermore, we can compute several lattice points simultaneously. Boundary conditions are imposed along free-form surfaces to control the Jell-O ® shape, and the ingredients are mixed using relaxation and annealing lattice algorithms until the matrix is chilled and ready-to-eat.

Previous researchers have observed that, under certain conditions, Jell-O ® wiggles [Sales, 1966]. We have been able
to simulate these unique and complex Jello-O ® dynamics using spatial deformations [Barr, 1986] and other hairy mathematics….

Somehow I think the above is at least partly tongue-in-cheek. But with computer folk (and jello), it can be hard to tell.

AIG outrage[s] of the day

The New Neo Posted on by

outrageous.jpg

There’s an awful lot of outrage going around.

The American people are outraged that their hard-earned money has been taken from their pockets and doled out by Congress and the administrations (Bush’s first, and now especially Obama’s) with virtually no oversight as to who gets what, or why.

Congress is outraged at the very people they failed to police, but not of course at themselves or members of their own parties (funny how that works) for that sin of omission.

Obama is outraged at the handouts that he knew about earlier (see this and also this) but failed to be outraged about (got that?). Perhaps he’s really outraged at Geithner for appearing to be a pallid, clueless milquetoast, or at Summers for not sounding outraged enough when Summers pronounced the AIG bonuses “outrageous” but added there was nothing legal to be done to stop them.

Larry Kudlow swallows his outrage long enough to ask this very pertinent question:

Incidentally, has anybody asked Team Obama why it is more than willing to break mortgage contracts with a bankruptcy-judge cram-down, but won’t cram-down compensation agreements for AIG, despite the fact that the U.S. government owns the company? Kind of odd, don’t you think?

Tim Rutten of the LA Times is outraged about the same thing.

Kudlow thinks Geithner cannot survive this. I’m inclined to agree. One of the reasons for my opinion is that I spent a goodly part of last evening visiting a couple of the major blogs on the Left and looking at their comments sections.

The general trend was to blame Geithner and Summers. Hardly a word was said about Obama himself; the sense I got was that the commenters agreed with Maureen Dowd that Obama is being ill-served by his financial appointees (the few he’s made so far, that is; perhaps that’s why he’s been so slow in appointing the rest).

Those who remain Obamaphiles (a dwindling crew, perhaps?) are outraged at the whole situation but so far find it easier to castigate Summers (who was disliked by the Left even before he took the job) and Geithner, who has been a bipartisan public relations disaster, than to point the finger directly at Obama himself.

Obama should have a sign at his desk that says “The Buck Stops Anywhere But Here.” Or perhaps “The Dog Ate My Homework.”

[ADDENDUM: On watching just a few minutes of members of the Congressional committee grilling AIG head Liddy, I’m outraged at the outrage of many of the questioners. Some who are now so very outraged at the relatively piddly $165 million in AIG bonuses want us to forget the trillion-dollar outrage of the pork-laden stimulus package that many of them voted for plus the enormous proposed budget that many of them still support. (Here’s a list of committee members.)

And some of them (the cable networks are very bad at identifying who’s speaking, so it’s difficult to say who’s who at this point) are fuming at Liddy for moves made long before he came out of retirement to try to clean up the mess. This sort of grandstanding and self-aggrandizing puffery is what we’ve come to expect of members of Congress, especially in televised hearings that give them the opportunity to show how tough they are.]

When is a bonus not a bonus?

The New Neo Posted on by

When it’s a contractual obligation.

Not having a lot of experience in the corporate world myself (my only stint having been a summer job in college) I always thought the word “bonus” meant something extra, a special payment given for merit. Dummy me.

The argument for the AIG bonuses goes something like this: for government to arbitrarily abrogate these contractually obligated bonuses would undermine employees’ confidence in the sanctity of contracts. What’s more, in the case of AIG, it would antagonize—and perhaps cause the resignation of?—the very people AIG needs to sort out the mess.

Well, perhaps, although I’m not totally convinced.

Edward M. Liddy, the new government-appointed head of AIG who can hardly be accused of taking too much taxpayer money (he’s working for the sum total of a dollar a year), thinks so:

We cannot attract and retain the best and brightest talent to lead and staff [the company] if employees believe that their compensation is subject to continued and arbitrary adjustment by the U.S. Treasury.

I certainly wouldn’t call this “arbitrary;” there seems to be just cause. But then again, not all AIG employees are responsible for this mess. In fact, it is a relatively small percentage, and there should be some way to discover who these people are and stop their bonuses, which would make the decision non-arbitrary. After all, although the general idea of the binding contract is vital to the functioning of our society, individual contracts and their terms, as well as how they might be enforced or abrogated, are the subject of lawsuits all the time.

Such lawsuits tend to be expensive, however, and therein lies the rub. Would it cost more to fight these bonuses than to grant them? But would it be worth it, because failure to stop the payments would be a bad example not only because it would violate our “fundamental values,” as President Obama has declared, but also because it would provide a reward for bad behavior?

Unfortunately, that bad behavior has already been rewarded financially. And it probably will continue to be rewarded, since the article also quotes Pearl Meyer, a “compensation consultant” at Steven Hall & Partners, as saying, “The word on the street is that A.I.G. employees are being heavily recruited.”

And she doesn’t mean by the cops. Let’s just hope that those AIG employees who are so heavily sought after are not the same ones who were responsible for the debacle. But I’m wondering: what Wall Street companies are hiring these days?

[ADDENDUM: Here’s a grisly suggestion. But it would be nice to hear some reasonably calibrated admissions of accountability and remorse from those who messed up so grievously.]

More delicious spam

The New Neo Posted on by

Every now and then the creativity of the email spammers and phishers brings a smile to may face. Perhaps you’ll agree with me that the following demonstrates a certain flair and, shall we say, audacity:

I will like to start with reminding you that your unclaimed inheritance is still lurking around, up till now I am amazed at the way you have ignored all the notice I have sent out to you.

Upon the receipt of this mail I will want you to reconfirm to me your details and also tell me the reason why you have kept quiet all the while; I do believe you should have a logical answer to that.

Oh dear, oh dear, I better come up with something good.

And then there’s this:

This message will be the last notice that I will be sending out to you.

Is that a promise?

Testing spam filter

The New Neo Posted on by

Since my spam filter has decided to go nuts today, I’m starting a new thread in order to see whether comments will go through on this one. Comment away!

I’ll begin….

[NOTE: So far it appears that the spam problem is confined to the previous post.]

[ADDENDUM: I think I spruced up the spam filter to make it a bit more forgiving. I hope this will solve some of the problems.]