President’s Many Words Don’t Pack a Powerful Punch

During the 2008 campaign, MSNBC talk-show host Chris Matthews claimed he was so emotionally struck by an Obama speech that a “tingle went down his leg.” Matthews seemed no less impressed with the president’s delivery of last week’s State of the Union address, the first of Obama’s term. Offering commentary after the conclusion of the speech, Matthews noted that he “forgot Obama was black for an hour.”

Aside from any racial implications, more revealing from Matthews’ ridiculous comment is the time it took for Obama to deliver his message to Congress. By all accounts, the Democrats have lost the momentum obtained from their sweeping victories last November. Just six months ago, the president enjoyed a Super-Majority in the Senate with the House of Representatives being equally stacked with Democrats. With Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts, the Super-Majority is no more. In addition, Gallup’s daily tracking poll lists the country as divided concerning the president’s job approval, with 48 percent approving and 46 percent disapproving of Obama’s performance. Such numbers are poor for a president’s first year in Washington. Last month’s special election in Massachusetts, along with Republican gubernatorial victories in Virginia and New Jersey this past November, have served as referendums not only on the performance of Democrats within those states, but also on the framework being set forth by Obama. That the seat occupied by Ted Kennedy for over four decades would be won by a conservative Republican just months after Kennedy’s death is striking.
Given the response we have seen from Obama in the midst of such difficulty, the Democratic Party has cause for concern. Last week’s speech was the longest of Obama’s six-year career on the national political scene. With the length of his speech it is clear that Obama is trying to solve his problems with words alone.

In moments of national difficulty, the greatest American statesmen were brief in expressing strength and perseverance. Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural were two of the shortest speeches of his career. FDR’s Dec. 8, 1941 speech in response to Pearl Harbor was equally brief.

The problem that Obama faces is that, for all his political grandeur, he understands nothing of what Lincoln and FDR knew too well, namely, that words mean little when they are not sustained by reality. Lincoln and FDR backed up their words with consistent action. While past presidential speeches packed a short but powerful punch, Obama continues to fill his speeches more with words and less with meaning. In his speech last week, Obama attempted to recapture the “change” promised during his campaign. He said, “I campaigned on the promise of change – ‘Change we can believe in,’ the slogan went. And right now, I know there are many Americans who aren’t sure if they still believe we can change – or that I can deliver it. But remember this – I never suggested that change would be easy, or that I could do it alone.”

Americans have been quite clear in the past few months that they think things have changed, but for the worse. From Obama, they have been treated to nothing other than the usual political double-talk. Consider the president’s proposal, articulated in his State of the Union, to freeze federal spending. He said “we are prepared to freeze government spending for three years…Like any cash-strapped family, we will work within a budget to invest in what we need and sacrifice what we don’t.” It was Obama, however, who criticized John McCain’s proposed spending freeze during the 2008 campaign, saying “The problem with a spending freeze is you’re using a hatchet where you need a scalpel.”

Obama’s retreat on spending freezes stands on a long-list of his presidential flip-flops. Whether promising to shut down Guantanamo Bay or to televise the congressional health care debates on C-SPAN, Obama has shown time and again that his words have little or no correspondence to reality.

The president is slowly learning that his saying something does not make it true and that filling his speeches with more words will do nothing for him in the polls.