I don't know if I totally agree with you. Denny Hastert was a very good House Speaker and he was a fat, old, ugly, slow talking dude with thick glasses. He looked awful on TV and seemed very uncomfortable in interviews but he got real things done. On the other hand, we have Mr Tanning Booth with a $200 haircut running the House and a smooth talking southerner in the Senate and they are fully incapable of getting anything done.
Yeah, like standing up for his pal, William Jefferson, D-LA.
I wouldn’t give credit to McConnell as a smooth talking Senator. In Washington circles, yeah, he can probably be considered effective, but in the television age neither McConnell or Boehner are remotely effective. Guys like Mike Pense, Rubio, Paul Ryan, and Chris Christie are more of what I am talking about, effective, pursuasive, able to bring people in to their views. Hastert was fairly effective as Speaker in the sense that he provided the stability and reliability missing in the circus years he was there...compared to the end of Newt’s term, the brief Livingston speakership, and the constant negatives around Hastert’s Majority Leader DeLay.
Under Hastert we did not have an effective voice, though. He pretty much pushed through the Bush agenda and kept things in order...and stayed out of controversial. I don’t consider him to be a great spokesman for a cause.
My initial thought is that we have to get the most effective communicators out front. Those leadership positions automatically get the most airtime and sound bites, and we need the best of the best doing it. We clearly have not had that the past number of years.
Naah, Denny pretty much sucked, too.