Obama: I Regret Not Speaking Slower And Using Smaller Words. If I Had, You’d Realize How Lucky You Are I Let You Have Me As Your President
Drew M.
Ace of Spades HQ
7/12/2012
Make sure you check out the sneaky changes Slublog made to the unemployment chart, which I missed on first glance. Also, embedded video added after the fold.
You might think Obama’s greatest regret as President would be, oh I don’t know, massive unemployment, crushing debt, or even a couple of hundred dead Mexicans.
If you did think any of those things, you’d be wrong.
“When I think about what we’ve done well and what we haven’t done well,” the president said, “the mistake of my first term – couple of years – was thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right. And that’s important. But the nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism, especially during tough times.”Mr. Obama acknowledged the dissonance between others’ perception of his strength as an expert orator, and his own.
“It’s funny – when I ran, everybody said, well he can give a good speech but can he actually manage the job?” he said. “And in my first two years, I think the notion was, ‘Well, he’s been juggling and managing a lot of stuff, but where’s the story that tells us where he’s going?’ And I think that was a legitimate criticism.”
Pressed by Rose about what he felt he needed to explain better to the American people, the president corrected that he wanted to do more “explaining, but also inspiring.”…
Read the rest of the article where Drew has posted charts and video.
…The people who voted for him, including me, really did expect him to bring the country “a sense of unity and purpose and optimism,” but I don’t think a “story” is what we needed. He came to us with a story — his life story, told in his “Dreams” book, and somehow that led to people imagining him able to bring the country a new sense of unity and purpose and optimism. He chose, however, to do policy that simply wasn’t unifying. It was highly partisan and divisive, and for the longest time it has felt as though he is simply running for reelection. So the “story” of Barack Obama, the President, is not a compelling story at all.
And now, he seems to be saying: I’m such a great speechmaker, so if only I’d speechified more I could have sold all my policies as a good story, like I sold myself in the first place as a good story. As if all he really needed was more words. He’s so good with words…
Her post is definitely worth reading in full.
Related: Obama: Romney Not Qualified on ‘Economy as a Whole’
President Barack Obama, who has no business or economic qualifications whatsoever, accused rival Mitt Romney in a CBS interview of being unable to grasp “the economy as a whole.” Success and profit in the private sector, Obama said, were only part of the economy: “[A]s president, my job is to think about the workers,” he said, defining his role in terms peculiar to the world of community organizing and Big Labor…
Update: Barack Obama: People Who Watch FOX Are Stubborn (Video) And probably stupid, too.
