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Wordsmiths for Obama: redux — 24 Comments

  1. I can discern a lot about a wordsmith’s worthiness of the franchise from one clause.

    Chabon’s status: FAIL.

    I would accuse him of being a deceptive sophist spinning a web of specious arguments in order to bamboozle people, but I really don’t think he’s smart enough to do that. He’s precisely as dim-witted as he appears.

  2. “You campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose.”

    But prose is such a drag, you know. It’s like having to prepare for a debate. Yuck.

  3. Did Obama write his own books? My doubts increased when I read a letter Obama wrote in a Harvard school newspaper when he was in law school.

    I doubt that a high school senior with those grammar errors in his application/essay could get into Harvard.

  4. I had a friend who was tall and slender with a gorgeous baritone voice. One of the few actors I ever met from NY who always voted Republican. His take on Obama: Obama reads his lines nicely and many people assume that folks with a deep voice have gravitas. My friend didn’t believe Obama’s act.

  5. The fact is that 90% of those voters who were impressed by the fact that Obama was a published author were the Honey Boo Boos – they never picked up the book, they never tried to read it. Everything they knew about the book they learned from Oprah.

    My own reading of the book – not the whole thing, just enough to know I could never stomach the idea of having him in office – left me thinking that here was a man of almost exactly my age, with advantages I’d never had, who had taken away from his life’s experiences almost exactly the opposite lessons I’d taken from my own.

  6. FenelonSpoke – so you could conclude from that that 53% of America elected Obama’s pack of Kools.

  7. “You campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose.”

    That should be carved in stone somewhere very prominent.

  8. “You campaign in poetry but govern in prose” was originally from NY Gov. Mario Cuomo some 20+ years ago. He was in fact quite eloquent.

  9. Debates over the first book aside, nobody expends much energy denying that the second book was a pastiche of Obama speeches written by his main speechwriter at the time.

    For a reviewer to be impressed by that doesn’t say much about the reviewer.

    Shame Sorenson didn’t get that Pulitzer for Profiles in Courage, too.

  10. He gives a good speech. He has a deep voice. He’s tall. He’s slender. He knows what a dap is. And he can turn a literary phrase.

    His problem is that he’s full of crap.

  11. “If you can think your way through a sentence, through the algorithms involved in condensing information verbally and pitching it to an audience”

    Let me work my through this sentence…

    1) Claim that writing a sentence is like writing an algorithm, i.e. math. LOL.

    2) Condensing information verbally, has an assumption that you are getting information not dis-information.

    3) Pitching – so its sales, not an algorithm, and not simply information.

    I will stop here. But these are the kinds of beautiful sentences that can imply a lot of intelligence and experience without really it being the case.

  12. It’s not as pithy, but I think the more accurate statement where Obama is concerned is “You campaign on BS, you govern by funneling as much of the public purse to your cronies as you can”.

    At least that’s how I see it.

  13. Michael Chabon, arguably America’s best line-by-line literary stylist[.]

    Boy, is that a hoot or what?

    Can anybody on the planet quote a single line Chabon has written? He’s produced, what, about 400 pounds of books?

    One line. That’s all I ask.

  14. Compare also the eloquent British PM Lloyd-George against his top generals in World War One, neither of whom were articulate men in speech (though they were a lot better on paper, and better commanders than much written history gives them credit for.) Historian John Terraine speaks of Lloyd-George’s disdain for men he calls “the intelligent inarticulate”, which made me think a lot of George W. Bush.

  15. Before his presidential run, Obama gave an interview in which he talked about how drawn he was to “community organizing”. However, he believed that Saul Alinsky had been wrong in his “lead from behind” approach to community organizing. Obama’s experience had been that this approach was not effective. He believed that community organizing required a strong leader. I guess “leading from behind” is just for foreign policy and legislation.

    Think about that as you watch Valerie Jarrett say that Obama will be traveling the country more in his second term, connecting with Americans in order to hold Congress accountable. Obama and Jarrett both seem to believe that his shortcomings as a president stem mainly from not giving enough speeches. Early in his presidency, Jarrett also talked about Obama speakng “truth to power”. Seems sort of odd to me when referring to the man in the most powerful position on earth.

  16. If you can think your way . . . . . through the complexities of animating historical details into narrative . . .

    I would be far more impressed with this ability if the historical details which Obama added to his speeches were not so frequently false.

  17. Pingback:Politics and the Eloquence Fallacy | Andrew J. Patrick

  18. Pingback:Why wordsmith (pseudo)intellectuals tend to favor 0bama and big government « Spin, strangeness, and charm

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