The President's Speech Impediment

Wall Street Journal ^ | Sept. 6, 2011 | WILLIAM MCGURN

[Rudder]

In everyday life, when you don't have something to say, you avoid the stage. In our nation's capital, by contrast, the world operates like the one Alice found behind the Looking Glass. That's a world where you have to run as hard as you can just to stay still. Which helps explain why President Obama will this week be addressing a joint session of Congress that doesn't really want to hear from him about a jobs plan that he doesn't really have.

Expectations are high, the byproduct of a highly publicized back and forth with Republican Speaker John Boehner over the date of the president's speech. If you're a White House with a message, that's a good thing. Unfortunately for President Obama, he doesn't have one.

How do we know he doesn't? We know it from the White House itself. On Friday, Ed Henry quoted an unnamed presidential aide telling Fox News that while he didn't want to "downplay the speech," he needed to shoot down "the idea that this is the be-all and end-all."

So if this is not the "be-all and end-all" we've been told it was for weeks, why the initial announcement it would be held the same night Republican presidential candidates were holding a televised debate? And why do it before a joint session of Congress?

The answer to the first is that the speech most probably did not start out as a calculated attempt to upstage the Republican candidates. More likely, Thursday night was what White House aides originally had in mind—until they realized it would clash with the NFL's opening day. So they moved it back a day. That backfired because it looked so ungracious, but if you were President Obama, whom would you rather go up against: the GOP or the...Packers?

[Rudder]

In music there's a saying about a performance that was "too small for the house." That's becoming true of the president. There was a day when Mr. Obama's taste for the marvelous—a campaign address in Berlin, the faux presidential seal, the Greek columns that surrounded him during his speech accepting the Democratic nomination—all seemed to herald something exciting and historic.

Even inside the Beltway, however, substance ultimately tells. Three years into his presidency, the grander the stage the smaller Mr. Obama comes across.

[Doc Savage]

Any person who can stomach an hour of this mutant whistling his ‘s’es should receive a medal. Orator? More like a moron!

[Mrs. B.S. Roberts]

I cannot take that whistling for thirty seconds. Besides the hubby wont allow me to watch because I spend the whole time yelling. “Liar” and” that’s not how economics works you idiot” etc. Also I think hubby is afraid I’ll throw something through his beloved flatscreen
.

[RetSignman]

Even though his whistling s’s could be corrected, he would never do it. He loves his s’s and, if the truth were to be told, most talking heads and orators would give their right arm have that speech impediment.

As long as it wasn’t as bad as this guy. lol.
http://youtu.be/Luy8uu7Qobc

[jersey117]

Will he be using his black Detroit drawl for the big speech?

[liberalh8ter]

I didn’t realize “lying” was considered a speech impediment.

[Common Sense 101]

The President’s Speech Impediment

More like pResident Impediment will make a speech.

[newzjunkey]

Well said.