Frankly, for all the talk about how articulate he is (actually how well he reads his teleprompter), I have always found Barack Obama to be an overrated, pedantic bore who has a store of platitudes that he can pull out at any moment. Thanks to a pliant press, he has this undeserved reputation of being an inspiring speaker but when he has to talk of f the cuff, or his teleprompter does not work, he is reduced to “umm”, “uhh”, and Navy “Corpseman”.
by Robert Morrison
Aleksandr Zinoviev wrote a book under the old Soviet Union called The Yawning Heights. He used it to describe, almost obscenely, the speeches of Communist Party boss Leonid Brezhnev. The Russian words for “glistening” and “yawning” are very close and with Comrade Leonid’s drunken slurring, “the glistening heights of socialism” to which he was forever summoning his chained peoples came out “yawning heights.”
President Obama is surely no drunk. And we are not yet a captive people. But President Obama is also a bore. It’s not his fault. It’s socialism’s fault. Irish poet Oscar Wilde was once asked what he thought of world socialism. Wilde archly replied: “I think it would consume too many evenings.” He was right about that.
Socialism politicizes everything — literature, medicine, science, law, education, culture, religion, sports, all of life. And that ultimately makes socialism a crushing bore. President Obama is finding that tens of millions of Americans have tuned him out as he summons us to the heights. His audience for the State of the Union Address is down 18% this year over his first year.
Part of this is his speechwriter, a 29-year old who seems never to have had any contact with literature, American history, poetry, or the Bible. The speeches he crafts for this president are textbook examples of ennui.
Two million people gathered two years ago on the Mall to hear President Obama take the Oath of Office. It was assuredly an historic moment. But now, barely 25 months later, can anyone-supporter or opponent-recall a single memorable line from Inaugural Address? “Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.” He said that?
[….]
Mr. Obama was said by Newsweek’s Evan Thomas to hover over the nations at Normandy “like a god.” Awesome, but what did he say there?
Hand our leader a foreign crisis — like Libya. What does the president have to say about that? “This violence is unacceptable.” We don’t need a $400,000-a-year Commander-in-Chief and his $172,000-a-year speechwriter to tell us that.
He’s not the only war leader, by the way, with this problem. For all the hoopla about the movie, The King’s Speech, I doubt that any ticket-buyers can quote a single line of that much labored over radio address. His Majesty overcomes his stammer, by the Grace of God, but brings forth a rhetorical mouse.
[…]
Gov. Mitch Daniels wants us all to get over Ronald Reagan. Part of Reagan’s appeal to Americans in general and to conservatives in particular is that he was a Great Communicator. He modestly said it had been his privilege to communicate great ideas. He quoted the Founders more than any of the four presidents before him. And more than any of the four presidents who came after him. Maybe the reason Reagan was so great is that he didn’t think himself great.
When Ted Kennedy toasted Democratic Wise Man, Averell Harriman, the Massachusetts pol said Harriman at ninety was not so old: “Averell, you are only half as old as Ronald Reagan’s ideas.” All the liberal partygoers roared their approval.
President Reagan graciously responded to the jibe with thanks to the senator. “The Constitution is almost two hundred years old, and that’s where I get all my ideas,” the president said. Reagan was winsome, witty, and wise. He was never a bore. And we’ll never get over our need to such a leader
Read the rest: President Obama’s Yawning Heights
The parallels between Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama were commented on by conservatives before the 2008 election and now sadly they are becoming manifest. Obama’s incredibly feckless foreign policy as well as his spineless demeanor when faced with having to make a tough decision, is doing nothing but encouraging our adversaries to go for the jugular. It seems he really believed the 2008 hype how the world was going to love him and therefore would act better once George W. Bush were gone. As we commented on yesterday, Hillary Clinton has been a massive failure as Secretary of State.
by Ross Kaminsky
On Monday’s edition of CNN’s Situation Room, host Wolf Blitzer and political analyst Gloria Borger discussed President Barack Obama’s response to the situation in Libya, bringing unwitting clarity to the issue Barack Obama’s projected and real weakness.
First, they wondered aloud how it could have been that Barack Obama would come out relatively quickly against Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak who, while not a paragon of democratic virtue, was nevertheless an important and mostly reliable ally of the U.S. and partner in peace with Israel for three decades, but stay silent about Libya’s Colonel Muammar Gaddafi for nearly two weeks. Gaddafi is a man who has been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans and other westerners and who doesn’t even have allies in the Arab world.
[…]
In attempting to answer their own question of the administration’s delayed reaction to the revolt in Libya, Blitzer said that perhaps Obama was worried that strong words against Gaddafi might put at risk about 150 American diplomats in Tripoli. But the only way that would make sense is if Obama knows that he is, or at least is perceived in Libya as, the second coming of Jimmy Carter: a man who would let American diplomats be taken hostage and then not have the wisdom or courage to do whatever it takes to rescue them and cause great and permanent harm to the hostage takers.
After all, in the purely political world in which Barack Obama lives — and I write this understanding how Machiavellian it sounds — the taking of an American hostage by the Libyan (or any other) government could be as much a political opportunity as a political risk for our president. Of course, a rescue attempt could go horribly wrong, resulting in the death of those who we were trying to rescue. That would indeed reflect badly on the president, but not nearly as badly as doing nothing. Implicit in Blitzer and Borger’s comments is the all too believable suggestion that Barack Obama is too likely to do nothing, too afraid of a bad outcome or too disdainful of U.S. military power to do something, and that therefore the risk of American hostages is indeed one he cannot take.
[…]
When even CNN implicitly recognizes that Barack Obama probably is, and certainly is seen in the Arab world as, every bit as spineless as the worst American president in recent generations (until the current one), Barack Obama and Democrats who hope to get elected or re-elected in 2012 had better hope that foreign policy magically drops off the table as an issue before the elections. The way things are going in North Africa and the Middle East, the Obama-Carter comparisons are likely to haunt our current president through the election and will increase the chances that Barack Obama’s first term is also his last — much to the chagrin of dictators around the world.
Read the rest here: Barack Carter-Obama is back
