Yesterday, in a thread about the South Carolina primary, commenter “Peevish” wrote in the midst of a tangent about Barack Obama’s appeal to voters…:<\/p>\n
Obama, like Reagan, has an extraordinary oratory presence<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Interesting point there.<\/p>\n
I\u00a0give speaker points.\u00a0 My father was a speech teacher; I’ve earned a living\u00a0from speaking, and had it\u00a0as a wonderfully-rewarding avocation for\u00a0almost the past four years.\u00a0 Winston Churchill is one of my personal idols, if only for his talents as an orator.\u00a0\u00a0Like radio, oratory and communication are skills about which I\u00a0am pretty remorselessly clinical; I’ll state my admiration for the\u00a0politicians purely <\/em>on their communications skills, leaving their actual policies and beliefs out of the mix (for the moment, anyway).\u00a0<\/p>\n
Bill Clinton, while a poor big-crowd orator, was wonderful <\/em>at the up-close and personal stuff, and a master at the use of television.\u00a0 George W. Bush is famously bad at prepared oratory (although he’s had his moments), but is as good at off-the-cuff ad-libbing as anyone in the business.\u00a0 Paul Wellstone was an odd case; he could be a riveting speaker, as long as he didn’t let his emotions run away with him – then, he’d become a sputtering caricature that reminded one of the bastard love child of Benito Mussolini and Daffy Duck.<\/p>\n
Obama is an excellent speaker.\u00a0 How excellent?\u00a0<\/p>\n
“Like Reagan?”\u00a0 Well, he’s good.\u00a0 Good enough to cajole mainstream Republicans to vote Democrat?\u00a0We don’t know.\u00a0 So far, he’s spoken almost exclusively to friendly or benign audiences; campaign appearances, mostly.<\/p>\n
Is he good enough to sell conservative values in a state that is, and has been for decades, fundamentally hostile to them?\u00a0 We don’t know – Obama has never been an executive.<\/p>\n
Is he good enough to rally a nation behind a vision that goes against a congressional majority?\u00a0\u00a0 We don’t know – he’s never been an executive.\u00a0 His (short) legislative career has focused on voting on other peoples’ stuff, not making an intractable mass of enemies tractable.<\/p>\n
Good enough to rouse several nations full of slaves to hope for freedom, against not only the nations’ own governments and his own legislative opponents but elements of his own administration?\u00a0 We don’t know; Obama has never faced a situation anything like that.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Could <\/em>Obama do any of these things – things at which Reagan excelled?\u00a0 Perhaps – but there’s nothing in the record to tell us one way or the other.\u00a0 It’s said when Cicero spoke people said, “Wow, what a wonderful speaker Cicero is,” but when Demosthenes spoke they said, “let’s go pants Phillip of Macedonia.” (or words to that effect).\u00a0<\/p>\n
Can Barack Obama get Democrats to come out and vote for him?\u00a0 Sure.<\/p>\n
Can he get Republicans to go pants Philip of Macedonia?<\/p>\n
As good a communicator as he is, that remains to be seen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yesterday, in a thread about the South Carolina primary, commenter “Peevish” wrote in the midst of a tangent about Barack Obama’s appeal to voters…: Obama, like Reagan, has an extraordinary oratory presence Interesting point there. I\u00a0give speaker points.\u00a0 My father was a speech teacher; I’ve earned a living\u00a0from speaking, and had it\u00a0as a wonderfully-rewarding avocation […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2037","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campaign-08","category-geekery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2037","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2037"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2037\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}