Speaking In Sound Bites

by Dennis Green

John Meacham, editor of Newsweek, puts it precisely. “There’s nothing wrong with speaking in sound bites. Jesus did it. Lincoln did it. FDR did it. But Obama doesn’t do it.”

President Obama is brilliant, articulate, a great speech-maker, but he also comes across as aloof, dispassionate, and he leaves the impression that he governs from his head, not from his heart. Politics is not a civilized tennis match, but a knife fight, and Obama doesn’t come across as having a vicious bone in his body.

For let’s face it, speechmaking isn’t leadership, which is the down and dirty work behind the scenes. That takes not merely pragmatism, but cunning.

And in fact, he is a naïf. His notion that anything can be “bi-partisan” about this nation’s politics, for example, is hopelessly naïve and unrealistic. John Heillemann and Mark Halperin, authors of the best-selling Game Change, say that “Rahm Emmanuel thought he would make the Republicans so weak they would have to compromise. But they felt so weak that they couldn’t compromise.”

Others say that Obama wants to treat the electorate like adults, but that we Americans don’t want to have to behave like adults. The Tea Party and the town hall meetings would certainly confirm that. Moreover, adults don’t fight with knives. Reckless teenaged boys do.

“No Drama Obama.” It served him well as John McCain floundered in the face of the economic collapse, and Obama kept his cool. But that was a brief, passing moment. While, in our more rational, adult moments, we might prefer someone with no drama, in everyday life, we’re still, all of us, Drama Queens. We get off on it.

So Obama’s ratings have tanked. No surprise. So did Reagan’s at this point in his presidency, before his “Voodoo Economics” seemed to kick in and work. So did Bill Clinton’s, before he discovered “triangulation” as a strategy teaming up with conservatives to pass a welfare reform act. Clinton was clever enough to turn the popular impression of the GOP’s “Contract With America” to a “Contract On America,” with all its thuggish overtones.

And it’s very likely Obama will pull his irons out of the fire, but whether they will be nine-irons or something less remains to be seen. “Tiger Would!” and “Yes, We Can!” but it doesn’t really matter what we hope for, only what gets done. The Stimulus, Health Care Reform, Cap & Trade..? It’s just all too wonky for the average citizen to comprehend, let alone appreciate or applaud.

And ultimately, that’s Obama’s main problem. He’s a policy wonk, even worse than the Clintons. He’s calm, he’s deliberative, he’s thoughtful. But where’s his PASSION? If we don’t know by now, neither does he, and without a sense of that, the one thing Joseph Campbell said is most essential to our humanity, he’s doomed to remain a cipher.

No matter how eloquent his books, his musings about his absent father, and his origins and his search for meaning in his life, without a sense of passion, he seems to be driven by…what? Just more American…ambition? Ye gods! Not that.

He protests that he wants to make a difference, that his only ambition is to made this a better nation. That he doesn’t even care if he’s a one-term president, like Jimmy Carter. Perhaps, like Carter then, he’ll do more good after he leaves the office than he will while occupying that griddle we call the White House.

But in the meantime, he’s learning, as we all are, just how dysfunctional American government and politics has become.

©2010 Dennis Green