Obama's Not Your Daddy
by Tina Brown
from The Daily Beast
Obama has once again been browbeaten into showing he cares with a big speech Tuesday, but we all know by now he can't play chief therapist with any conviction. It's time to start focusing on raw politics.
President Obama is now on a TV binge to show that he is aggressively on top of the oil spill crisis. Today he’s in the Gulf again. Tomorrow night he’s doing a primetime Oval Office address to the nation, his first. It’s his pattern to hang back from doing media until there’s nothing on but commentators and cable shouters demanding that he show us he cares. Then, as the audience does a slow clap, he trounces the critics with a charismatic big speech.
That’s how it’s supposed to work, anyway. Tomorrow he’s announcing something concrete—an escrow account out of BP to get the cash to all the Gulf workers whose livelihoods have been trashed. But will this be deemed leaderly enough to assuage the angst among his supporters that the oil gushing into the Gulf is seeping away like his presidential potency? Obama fans become more and more glum that he keeps flubbing the very role he was expected to be so good at: Therapist to the nation. The Great Comforter.
The irony is that George W. Bush played the Daddy role with conviction. He grabbed a bullhorn at the World Trade Center and shouted, "I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon." When he went to West Point and made speeches, there was no dispiriting nuance to his message to the troops. We were over there in Iraq to kick ass and take names.
(More here.)
from The Daily Beast
Obama has once again been browbeaten into showing he cares with a big speech Tuesday, but we all know by now he can't play chief therapist with any conviction. It's time to start focusing on raw politics.
President Obama is now on a TV binge to show that he is aggressively on top of the oil spill crisis. Today he’s in the Gulf again. Tomorrow night he’s doing a primetime Oval Office address to the nation, his first. It’s his pattern to hang back from doing media until there’s nothing on but commentators and cable shouters demanding that he show us he cares. Then, as the audience does a slow clap, he trounces the critics with a charismatic big speech.
That’s how it’s supposed to work, anyway. Tomorrow he’s announcing something concrete—an escrow account out of BP to get the cash to all the Gulf workers whose livelihoods have been trashed. But will this be deemed leaderly enough to assuage the angst among his supporters that the oil gushing into the Gulf is seeping away like his presidential potency? Obama fans become more and more glum that he keeps flubbing the very role he was expected to be so good at: Therapist to the nation. The Great Comforter.
The irony is that George W. Bush played the Daddy role with conviction. He grabbed a bullhorn at the World Trade Center and shouted, "I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon." When he went to West Point and made speeches, there was no dispiriting nuance to his message to the troops. We were over there in Iraq to kick ass and take names.
(More here.)
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