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How the Master Rhetorician
Lost His Way Part Three of Three By Dave Andrusko
Michael Gerson's Friday Washington Post op-ed was written after President Obama's embarrassingly inept speeches in the Midwest this week, and before Obama's halting what-is-my-message? press conference today. But the headline applies equally well to both: "As midterms loom, Obama has lost his rhetorical touch." Critics and defenders, people of the Left, the Right, and everywhere in between agree that Obama has "lost his touch." Much of the time the word "rhetorical" is added to the sentiment, thus telling us that if only Obama's could reach back in time and conjure up candidate Obama's speechifying, all would be well. Not surprisingly Gerson, a speechwriter for President Bush, greatly admires a well-turned phrase. "I spent some time on the campaign trail with Obama during the primaries, coming away impressed by his earnestness, his touch of formality, his rhetorical ambitions -- here a little Kennedy, there a little King," he writes. "He consistently met the highest objective of an orator, both capturing and shaping the public mood." In the next paragraph, however, Gerson acknowledges it was essentially all speed and no altitude. Listening to Obama on the stump was about getting caught up in "style"--a few bromides about "unity, healing and national purpose." So if he gets a ten [my characterization] on "idiom," how about "agenda"? Well, agenda was "beside the point." Fast-forward to this week when Obama was, according to Gerson, "Self-pitying," "Snappish," " Humorless," and "Negative." Worst of all Obama was "determined to drive metaphors on and on until they expire from exhaustion." [Cars, gas pedals, going in reverse, ditches, etc.] Had he written the column at 2 this afternoon, Gerson would have been even harder on the President. Those are 75 minutes reporters will never get back. So is it just a crummy economy and worse poll numbers? No. Stripped of the mystique by the everyday duties of the presidency, Obama stands revealed for what he is: a pedestrian, big-government liberal in the pocket of the Abortion Establishment. Equally obvious, although Gerson is too kind to make the point, when separated from his teleprompter, Obama borders on incoherence. Whoever wrote those speeches in 2007 and 2008 must have taken a long-term sabbatical. But from our single-issue point of view, what is most revealing is how ObamaCare embodies Obama's abiding faith in Big Government and how it has set up him--and his party--for big trouble. Here's the operative paragraph: "But Obama's problem is deeper than his economic challenges. His policies as president -- particularly the creation of a health entitlement and his Rooseveltian emphasis on federal spending to create public-sector jobs -- have reopened and widened the main partisan division in American political life….. They are not only unpopular; they have made it impossible for him to maintain the pretense of being a unifying, healing, once-in-a-generation leader. It is the agenda that undermined the idiom." The larger context in which this rests should not be missed. ObamaCare is an electoral guillotine for Democrats running in November because (a) it embodies the top-down mentality that is embedded in the DNA of his party's approach to governance; (b) it was passed over the vocal opposition of a majority of the American people; (c) it opens governmental sluices, flooding the Abortion Industry with rivers of money; and (d) its sale was steeped in lies and transparent falsehoods. All these chickens--and a henhouse full of other ones--are coming home to roost. Please send your comments to daveandrusko@gmail.com. |
