[This could be a GD, I suppose, but I thought it’d be better here.]
I ask because I’ve read bloggers like this say he’s absolutely terrible. They (not this person, but others) claim that he accidentally thanked himself in a prompted speech (meaning he’s a bad speaker), and so on. Yet, of course, one of the main draws to his supporters is that he’s a very good speaker, an opinion I don’t think would’ve taken hold if he were that bad.
So I thought I’d ask all of you (ESPECIALLY those who’ve actually watched/heard him in person) how good a speaker he is, especially when he’s “off the prompter,” as it were. All I know is from sound bites and clips, which obviously don’t give much of an idea either way.
I think he’s a highly intelligent speaker and very well informed about the issues. He has the same vocal tics (for lack of a better word) that virtually everyone has – he says “um” and whatnot. I have no idea whether his intonations of such are higher than average for someone speaking with such exacting scrutiny of his words. In other words, he can be asked about virtually anything relevant to his administration, and within reason, will be able to competently talk about the subject. This doesn’t mean he has every fact and figure at his disposal when speaking, of course, which is why he takes care with what he says. That care (to me) comes out in his speech patterns.
He is not (yet) a polished politician, in that he hasn’t been under such scrutiny for long (relatively speaking), so sequestering the ums is not second nature. It may never be.
I believe that this charge is another fine contribution of the Right Wing Marketing Department. First, there was the Palin spectacle. She took criticism for being completely unaware of a vast range of topics and trying to bluff her way through it. Contemporaneously, Obama was being touted for his oratory prowess, and attacks were made on her for her relative ignorance. Take those factors, and add in the long-standing joke of Bushshisms, and you have a relative strength that the RWMD is doing their best to portray as a weakness.
Rush is now (at least the bits I was able to listen to) referring to the Teleprompter in Charge, and harping on Obama’s use of it as anomalous and somehow a weakness. This overlooks that he writes the majority of his speeches (is it still a majority?), or that staying on message is a staple of politics (didn’t Reagan memorize his speeches?). That’s just one talking head example, but adding things up seems to come to an empty assault: attack a strength, and make hay out of an otherwise irrelevant “flaw”.
I listened to him for about an hour during the Indiana primaries, no teleprompters, just a nice big gym and a stump speech tailored to the area. I was pretty impressed at the obviously memorized stuff, but the more local bits were particularly surprising. I got the sense that he’d spent the past week reading up solely on central Indiana, even though that certainly wasn’t the case.
Obama strikes me as having the speaking style of a very intelligent professor. He knows what the hell he’s talking about, but there’s so much he could say about issue X that he needs notes/prompts to stay on track. I think that he writes (or wrote) the majority of his speeches speaks to this; his writers are (or were) mostly there for cleanup. I get the feeling that if I were in his Constitutional Law class, he’s the kind of guy that students could get to blow an entire class just talking about some news that’s tangentially related to what we should be studying. And the class would still learn a heck of a lot from that too.
Hillary Clinton* visited the same gym a couple days later and I also got a chance to listen to her. For whatever reason, I just didn’t find her as impressive. Of course, she comes across as very intelligent too, but not strikingly so.
*Full disclosure- I was an Obama supporter all along, so my memory may be a bit biased. While I like the woman, she struck me as being best suited to the Senate. Hillary as SecState, though, also looks like a good fit.
I heard him in CT for an hour and he was a fantastic orator. The main problem is with many heads of state is that the cameras both still and video are on them all the time. It has to be incredibly tough for these people. Obama fumbles in front of the screen sometimes, but I’m sure he’s just proving his humanity. this BS claim by the right and msm that he’s the messiah is just that, BS. The problem is all of this gaffes and other missteps are cought on camera or audio so EVERYONE globally knows about it as it happens.
I think he’s above average, but not great. I notice he makes a lot of pauses that sound awkward to my ears, almost like he’s about to say something and catches himself right before he’s about to say it. I also think he has a weird cadence to his speech. His inflection is often totally opposite what I would expect.
I saw him speak once, before his run for President. He appeared at a campaign event for Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, in Hoboken.
There was no teleprompter, as far as I could tell. Obama did fine. He gave a good speech, kept the crowd interested, and all in all was pretty impressive. He did seem tired, but someone at the event told me that he’d been on the road for days at that point.
You do know that the right doesn’t claim that he’s the Messiah, no? They say that the public and the media are treating him as though he were the Messiah. So while Obama is indeed “just proving his humanity,” I don’t see how that either proves or disproves the right’s objection.
This is really just supposition on my part, but I interpret the “verbal tics” and pauses during his non-telepromptered speech as a bit of caution on his part. I often do the same things when I’m trying to be careful about my wording. When I’ve noticed Obama doing this, it’s usually been around a subject fraught with opportunity for a misplaced word or a sound bite easy to be lifted and replayed out of context, and I think he’s doing his best to make sure that what he’s about to say is precisely what he wants to say and precisely what he wants others to hear.
I agree with the others who have characterized it as “professorial,” and I, for one, am OK with that. In general, I would much rather have the President assume that I’m more intelligent and interested than I really am, as opposed to the other way around.
Something like this did happen, and while it might show that Obama has become very accustomed to having a teleprompter, I don’t think it says anything about his ability to speak without it. It was a technicalerror, where his own speech was still on the teleprompter when his guest started speaking, and then either by reading a suddenly changed prompter or just having a silly moment, Obama thanked himself.
I think he sounds like a very likable guy, but it sounds like he makes an awful lot of gaffes. I don’t keep notes on him but just off the top of my head I can remember three bad ones from the campaign and two very recent ones.
From the campaign:
He insulted gun owners and religious people in a talk with rich liberals in San Francisco.
He suggested bombing Pakistan, a US ally.
He said something about visiting 57 states.
Recently he insulted special needs children on Jay Leno’s show and talked about the “profits/earnings” ratio. This might not have been a slip. Perhaps he really didn’t know the correct term.
He’s also said some dopey things where it’s hard to know what he thinks is smart to say and what’s an error. For instance, saying he wants to redistribute the wealth during the campaign. Or telling the Reps they should stop listening to Rush Limbaugh. Maybe he really wants to say those things and would have put them on the teleprompter.
Also, I haven’t read much news this week so I don’t know the specifics, but it seems like after he decided to pretty much extend the government purchase of AIG he then started to vilify the executives. Not the smartest way to protect our investment. But again, maybe he said just what he wants to. It could be his way of speaking to his base, as they say. And there’s been no shortage of lefty yahoos making death threats and harassing AIG employees this week.
Funny that in a survey about BHO it takes just one post to bring out vicious attacks on GWB, Sarah Palin and conservatives.
What he said was that, if the United States had actionable intelligence that high level al’Qaeda targets were in Pakistan and the Pakistani government was unable/unwilling to take them out then the US should strike those targets. In other words, we weren’t going to let bin Laden camp out in a cave just because the Pakistani government wasn’t inspired to get him themselves. From Obama’s speech:
Bolding mine.
I doubt there was a candidate for president who would have actually disagreed with that and said “Nah, if Musharraf (well, back when it was Musharraf) won’t act, we’ll just sit on it.” Several politicans tried to twist it out of context and make it sound as though Obama was ready to march on Islamabad but that was hardly the case.
It still doesn’t sound quite as diplomatic as I might like. He could have said “If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we’ll do our best to persuade him. He’s a reasonable guy. I’m sure we could reach some consensus.”
But in any event thanks for doing the research… sounds like my bigger screw up here was that I cited a teleprompter, or prepared remark. Not an off the cuff gaffe.
That’s not the point. Expressing that sentiment in a public forum (by a major presidential candidate), whether universally (outside of Pakistan) agreed to or not, was showing extreme naivete or diplomatic stupidity.
Of course, if Bush had said anything like it to Democrats, “neo-fascist” would have been considered a better word.
As to the OP, it is a little hard to decide at this point. Obama did well delivering his stump speeches during the campaign, and various prepared speeches in the last two months. He can get away with that “black preacher” oratorical style, which a white person couldn’t, so there is somewhat more of a tradition from which he can draw (as well as a higher standard he has to hit).
Most of it is simply confirmation bias - Obama supporters are going to overlook whatever gaffes he commits, and angrily attack anyone who suggests he is stupid or a bad speaker based on evidence they would accept unhesitatingly about a Republican President.
There hasn’t been a great occasion on which BO can deliver a great speech, as Bush did. Perhaps he will. It is just harder to see a great occasion in ‘we need to spend another trillion in borrowed money’ in the same way as