The Adolescent President | National Review Online
By George Will 4-23-14
The rhetorical excesses of Barack Obama.
Recently, Barack Obama — a Demosthenes determined to elevate our politics from coarseness to elegance, a Pericles sent to ameliorate our rhetorical impoverishment — spoke at the University of Michigan. He came to that very friendly venue — in 2012, he received 67 percent of the vote in Ann Arbor’s county — after visiting a local sandwich shop, where a muse must have whispered in the presidential ear. Representative Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) had recently released his budget, so Obama expressed his disapproval by calling it, for the benefit of his academic audience, a “meanwich” and a “stinkburger.”
Try to imagine Franklin Roosevelt or Dwight Eisenhower or John Kennedy or Ronald Reagan talking like that. It is unimaginable that those grown-ups would resort to japes that fourth-graders would not consider sufficiently clever for use on a playground.
When Theodore Roosevelt was president, one of his good friends — he had been best man at TR’s 1886 wedding — was the British diplomat Cecil Spring Rice. So, when visitors to Washington wanted to learn about TR, they asked Rice about him, and Springie, as TR called him, would say: “You must always remember that the president is about six.” Today’s president is older than that. But he talks like an arrested-development adolescent.
Anyone who has tried to engage a member of that age cohort in an argument probably recognizes the four basic teenage tropes, which also are the only arrows in Obama’s overrated rhetorical quiver. They were all employed by him last week when he went to the White House briefing room to exclaim, as he is wont to do, about the excellence of the Affordable Care Act.
-go to link-
No comments:
Post a Comment