Why did Obama give the speech?
Jennifer Rubin points out that Obama offered nothing especially significant in terms of new policy in his speech last night, certainly not anything substantially different from the previous umpteen-thousand speeches he’s made on the subject of health care reform. So why did he make it? Why bother?
I offer the following reasons:
(1) To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Obama’s favorite tool by far is the prepared speech.
(2) There is a crisis, but it’s not the one Obama talked about. We could indeed use some changes in the way health care is covered in this country, but there’s no pressing need to pass this (or any other) particular bill at this particular time (or to have passed it a couple of weeks ago, as Obama originally wanted). The crisis is in Obama’s presidency and approval ratings. He has staked his reputation on the passage of health care reform, and perceives that time is not on his side. Thus, the fierce urgency of now.
(3) There are several audiences here. But the first is Congress—after all, he could have just given another prime time speech to the American people, but instead he chose the rather unusual venue of the joint session. This guarantees greater TV coverage, and it also gives his speech greater gravitas and thrust. But some of his speech also featured an implicit chastisement of Congress itself—the Right for being partisan (that is, for failing to cave in to the demands of the Left without a whimper of protest) and the Left for not cutting him some slack on the public option. No, Obama didn’t exactly say those words, but that was the message.
(4) Obama wanted to be perceived as tough; he wants opponents to fear his wrath and his power. In connection with #3 above, Obama wanted to publicly chastise and threaten the Right; “If you misrepresent what’s in the plan, we will call you out.” But I think he also wanted to send a message of toughness and willingness to fight to the far Left—and I don’t just mean to fight for the bill, I mean to fight them, if need be. He wanted those on the Left who are wedded to a public option to understand that, if a public option must be dropped for strategic reasons and they don’t come on board anyway, there could be negative repercussions for them personally.
(5) Obama has been criticized as passive and lacking in leadership in this fight. This is his attempt to be seen as active and involved. That’s part of the reason why he talks so much about what he will do, what he will tolerate and what he won’t, how he won’t stand for this and he won’t stand for that. This is the sort of thing he mistakes for true leadership. You might call it leadership, Chicago style.
(5) For Obama, a speech is always another opportunity to set up strawmen and then shoot them down. He counts on the inability of the American people to use critical thinking when they are swept up in the music of his oratory [more about this in my next post].
With respect to your number (5) in your post – hasn’t that been his pattern from day one? In terms of focusing on himself — all the I, I, I, me, me, me in his speeches.
I never paid much attention to his campaign speeches since he never was my cup of tea. But after the election it seemed somehow jarring and “off” to me very early on – this sort of dictatorial tone. I recall when he instructed one of the college basketball teams – might have been UNC – when the media was all agush and agog over The One participating in March Madness pools -“Now you make sure you don’t let ME down.”
I KNOW it was with a smile. But my gut reaction to something like that is to want to respond…..”or you will do what?”
And very early on also, he said something to troops or to a group of veterans along the lines of “I’M not going to let your benefits be taken away.” Instead of “WE’RE not going to…” or “I will work with Congress to…” or, “Under my administration, we will see that….”
The kind of phrasing every other president in my lifetime has always used.
With him it is always “I will do this,” and “I will do that.”
Which is creepy to me. And reinforces that whole Che poster/ cult of personality thing.
Or is that just me? Am I dreaming?
Obama and this Congress are very dangerous people. There is a shamefull lack of leadership from the opposition. It is time for a replacement to the Republican Party. It is time for us ordinary citizens to stand up and bear the burdens of freedom, or resign ourselves to serfdom. Is there iron left in the American male/female? We shall see.
Lucius, there is a tide in the affairs of men, and all that. I think the best thing Republicans can do right now is let Democrats run amok, to vaccinate another generation against liberalism.
Liberalism sounds good, people say? OK, let’s see some in action…that’ll disabuse them of the naive viewpoint that free lunches await.
I’m not surprised that angry Obama showed up last night. It’s probably closest to the real Obama than anything else. I look at tons of Obama photos for my NoMoBama page (at my name) I noticed a curious pattern that I turned into:
Cardboard Obama Photo Essay It’s pretty funny.
You learn that Obama is literally a cardboard person who is more interested in the camera than those around him. He is a total fraud of a person. I also could do a photo montage of his touching or putting two hands on the person he’s with, a not uncommon power play.
I think Obama or his boss made a serious by doubling down last night. He should have pulled in his horns, said he understood some people’s concerns, that he had failed to explain it all cogently – in short, a mea culpa – and then said he was directing Congress to get back to work on a new transparent bill that would be fully discussed before being legislated.
That would have goosed his popularity northwards, positioned him again in the center, and prepared him later to marginalize his opponents as unreasonable extremists. Now he looks that way, and Blue Dog Democrats will be running for cover.
Not a good move, politically.
southernjames: You are exactly correct. See this as well.
Occam, I’m thinking that the worst thing we can do is to let those people run amok. (And by “we”, I mean folks like the people who populate this blog…the Republicans – both in Congress and the Party itself – are broken reeds as far as I am concerned.) We’ve got a perfect storm here – economic crisis and an Administration and Congress who make their predecessors look like models of fiscal restraint. This nonsense needs to be stopped now, before more damage can be done – before irreparable damage is done, both to the world economy and to our country’s fabric.
Had France lived up to her Locarno Pact obligations in 1934, Germany’s militarization of the Rhineland would have failed and the General Staff would likely have gone up the street and had ‘Dolf arrested and shot. There would likely have been no WW II (at least in Europe), and A.H. would have gone down as a footnote to history. We need to see that happen to this Administration, and to make the Eleventy-Worst Congress naught but an evil memory…
(Okay, so my example had Nazis in it. Sue me. It’s sort of like you can’t have a good Indiana Jones movie without Nazis in it…)
With respect to your number (5) in your post – hasn’t that been his pattern from day one? In terms of focusing on himself – all the I, I, I, me, me, me in his speeches.
Ah, that’s true. So far as it goes.
The other side of that coin is this one: if it’s all about The Won, then why didn’t The Won present a reform bill of his own devising, as if fully formed from the mind of The Won?
Allow me to answer my own question. If he does this, then he’s on record as being the owner of this legislation. And that’s the worst possible thing he can have happen. It negates his ability to blame others for his problems.
So he’s trying to play it both ways: involved, active, agressive, but also completely blameless when it doesn’t work out as promised.
Where I come from, that’s called being a yeller-bellied, sap-sucking coward.
neo: What no hat tip? Or perhaps you are a regular reader of the remarkable Jennifer Rubin too. I don’t know how she turns out so many high-quality articles almost every day!
Obama’s excessive reliance on his speechmaking is something we haven’t seen before. He is not just a man with a hammer; he seems to be a man who only has a hammer.
Bill Clinton could give a great speech, but one also had the sense that he was governing: building coalitions, managing details, making necessary appearances, being halfway competent at not screwing up the economy and foreign policy, not alienating our allies, and so forth.
I’m hard pressed to list any accomplishments for Obama in eight months. He got the stimulus package through, yet unemployment has soared far past his promised limit. Cash for Clunkers is apparently snarled in red tape, though it seemed like a straightforward enough operation.
Brian, you may be right. I wobble on this issue. The answer turns on just how much damage Obama and the Dems can do before we turn them out of office.
Reds generally are curious creatures. They have an amazing ability to seize power, based upon their ideological commitment, iron discipline, and naturally conspiratorial proclivities. But once they have it, they turn into Laurel and Hardy trying to paint out of the same bucket.
They’re formidable as opponents, but hopeless as proponents. Opposition therefore naturally suits them; they can wax poetic about how dogs and cats would get along if only the grownups had implemented their policies. As a counterfactual, their contention is impossible to disprove.
But now the shoe is on the other foot. They have to engage in the messy business of acting in the real world, where dogs and cats don’t generally get along, where often the options range from bad to horrible, and one can only choose the least unpalatable one.
So my expectation – or my hope, at least – is that this crash course in reality therapy will dry out many Dem supporters, and perhaps even some Dem politicians, and vaccinate a generation against their childish fantasies.
So my expectation – or my hope, at least – is that this crash course in reality therapy will dry out many Dem supporters, and perhaps even some Dem politicians, and vaccinate a generation against their childish fantasies.
Occam’s Beard: That’s my hope too — knock on wood.
Given that this is the prime-time of the Boomers’ power, it was perhaps inevitable that we would have a quintessential Sixties kinda president.
Assuming we get through the Obama era without too much damage, I doubt we’ll be electing another president like him for decades.
Occam’s Beard,
Thanks for responding to my post. Your arguement is absurd. The Democrats are consolidating a permanent interfering, unaccountable, regulatory bureaucracy at the expense of the citizenry. The Republicans have their hands in this also, that is part of the reason for their cowardness. To sit back and do nothing is a complete abdication. Do you want to be a free man or not? This current Federal structure, established since FDR cannot stand. It cannot stand economically, critically, legally or morally. We are borrowing trillions to support this ediface. We are at a tipping point. Our dollar will collapse, inflation will come, along with social unrest and violence. The basic laws of economics apply to the USA also. Trouble is coming people. Gird yourselves.
Occam, I’m there with you on your last point…problem is that, often, the “turn out the rascals” attitude in a lot of folks applies to other people’s rascals – they like their own rascal just fine…wash, rinse, repeat in 435 Congressional districts and we wind up with the same (or mostly the same) flotsam and jetsam…
“(5) [The second one and not the first :)]
For Obama, a speech is always another opportunity to set up strawmen and then shoot them down. He counts on the inability of the American people to use critical thinking when they are swept up in the music of his oratory.”
I actually think he counts on the media never to call him out (to use a phrase). If the media really wants to fact check and go around writing long articles about how people are “lying” or shading the truth then they could very well start with Obama. His abuse of strawmen is worse than those flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz. Yet have they ever “gone there”? I don’t think so. So there’s no incentive for him to back off of those types of arguments. As was demonstrated last night, it’s not generally good form to interrupt someone’s speech and call them a liar, and the ones that could do so afterward (and have a mass-market national audience) never do. I think there are plenty of individual people who aren’t fooled at all. Fortunately, there is at least some pushback via blogs and other less-traditional media outlets.
Grrr…just thinking about it sickens me. He is the one that has all the power and the media decides it’s their role to jump on the least little challenge to that power instead of doing what they always claim to do and speak truth to power. They did the same with Rev. Wright, and every other time he’s been under pressure.
Also, (1), that nails it perfectly (pun only semi-intended). When you’re a hammer everything looks like a nail and Obama’s version of a hammer is, of course, pretty speechifying. Although from the few clips I heard of him last night, I still don’t quite get why he’s considered eloquent. In the parts I heard he sounded either harsh or actually nervous and stumbly.
huxley: Nope, I hadn’t seen your discussion of her piece when I wrote mine.
The stock market rallied today, especially health-insurer stocks. Much of the discussion about Obama’s speech was derailed by Rep Wilson’s outburst rather than Obama’s wondrous-osity or the speech’s game-changiness.
So far the speech was an expensive dud. Aside from State of the Union and Inaugural addresses, it is comparatively rare for presidents to address both Houses of Congress. As I count it up, there have only been sixteen such addresses since JFK. So Obama wheeled out a very large cannon last night and got very little for it.
One wonders whether Obama was arrogant or desperate in playing that card.
re: Occam’s Beard at 5:26 p.m.–
Even though the circumstances are completely different, you’ve reminded me of the Clinton confession in 1998, and how he (apparently on Hillary’s insistence) decided to be defiant instead of contrite.
I believe Clinton was capable of remorse, even if sometimes only because he’d been caught. I’m not so sure the “I”-man, whose under-publicized rantings include such narcissistic blather as “It turns out I’m pretty good at it (being POTUS),” “You’re destroying my presidency!” and the ubiquitous “I won” even has the capacity. Both of them represent the party of petulant children, and it turns out that they are first-rate ambassadors.
Obama’s excessive reliance on his speechmaking is something we haven’t seen before. He is not just a man with a hammer; he seems to be a man who only has a hammer.
[liberal eyeglasses on]
Racist!! Drawing parallels to john henry…
[liberal eyeglasses off]
Maybe thats a metaphore?
Think Obama would say, “I’m President, and it turns out I’m very good at it” today?
If he did, what do you think the reaction would be in various quarters? Once the laughter died down, I mean.
What is it with these Liberals (as the word is currently used)? They hate guns and war (successful – they love losing ones) yet Albert was constantly doing his revival tent frothing, “I will FIGHT for you. I wondered then: it was his administration; what’s he fighting?
I don’t think he wants a victory because he “needs” one. He IS a victory.
He must make us realize it.
Why did Obama give the speech? Because speechifying is what he does. It’s like asking why fish swim.
We need another teleprompter get-together like a fish needs a bicycle.
Just sayin’
Obama’s Speech Is Seen as Unifying Democrats
President Obama’s speech on health care failed to bridge the gulf with Republicans, but Democrats said on Thursday that the president had largely succeeded in unifying his own party by making a cogent, persuasive pitch to the American public and by casting his plan to overhaul the health care system as a political and moral imperative.
Twenty-four hours later and this is the best the NY Times can do for Obama’s extravagant expenditure of political capital last night?
Obama “largely succeeded in unifying his own party”? Well, whoop-ti-doo, as my grandmother used to say.
Never mind the piney air freshener about “a cogent, persuasive pitch.” The NY Times is talking about failure as sweetly and politely as it can when it comes to the Obama.
Thanks Huxley.
———-
As for Obama and why he gave the speech: to borrow words from an obviously tough-minded, deep thinker – – ‘this is a downright mean’ . . . man / administration.
I’m on the DSCC mailing list (not sure why) and today I recieved the most hilarious fund raising letter from James Carville, the first sentance is: “President Obama has gotten more done for the American people in seven months than George Bush did in eight years.” I am sending back an apology in the return envelope. “Dear James, I am sorry but I have to save my money to pay for the huge tax increase that is coming to pay for your Stimulous Bill and when my electricity cost goes thru the roof because of Cap and Trade and of course the bogus Healthcare Reform. Sorry but I’m broke.”
You’re welcome, JohnC.
Looking at Rasmussen today, the Times appears to be correct. The Presidential Approval Index has bucked up to -5, not because those who disapprove and strongly disapprove have been won over, but because the strongly approve number has jumped to 34%, a level we haven’t seen since early August.
So Obama’s speech wasn’t all for naught. It did shore up his position within his own party, but that is a rather frivolous use of the Joint Session speech which in the past has been more usually the province of crisis such as, oh say, the President addressing Congress after the attacks of 9-11.