So I finally got around to watching infamous video of Obama’s remarks on the attack on Charlie Hebdo:
And, yes, everyone is right that he seems unengaged and half-asleep.
But here’ why Obama was soporific: the teleprompter was scrolling through his speech too slowly. All of the pauses? He was waiting for the next line of text.
Of course, this is an explanation, not an excuse. For a short speech, with little content, he shouldn’t be using the teleprompter, and in any case, it was awful to have this distracting moving of his head from side-to-side, which might be made to look natural when giving a speech to a large audience (as if you’re just making eye contact with people on either side of the auditorium), but is just terrible when speaking into a camera.
Compare, for example, to Reagan, in his speech addressing the Soviet downing of flight KAL 007 in 1983. True, this was a speech for which Reagan and the speechwriters had more time to prepare — it was given on September 5th, where the plane was shot down on September 1st (though these days were spent uncovering the facts of the case, not speechwriting).
And, of course, the thoroughly impromptu speech that Bush made at the site of the World Trade Center:
Which brings me to the question: Why didn’t Obama go to France?
Yes, of course, there are multiple reasons. It’s true that security is an issue — though, the more I think about it, if our American security precautions are so mind-bogglingly extensive that it prevents our president from travelling in such circumstances, then this goes to far, and needs to be curtailed.
But this business that his advisors didn’t event tell him about it? No, that’s not an excuse. Obama is a grown man, and if he’s making even rudimentary efforts to do his job, he should have been the one initiating the discussions with staff. (Yes, I know, we hear report after report of how much time he spends “unwinding” from the stresses of the job by exercising, socializing, watching sports, and much less reporting on the hard work he’s doing that produces all this stress.)
There are further explanations “out there” — that it’s all due to his narcissism, and his unwillingness to be “just another world leader” marching with the pack, or, contrarily, his expectation that, if he attended, he would inappropriately be the center of attention. There are speculations that he really doesn’t want to show any support for Charlie Hebdo because he disagreed with what they were doing in the first place, even claims that he’s a one-man sleeper cell for Islamism. (OK, the last of these was an article that said, paraphrasing, “I started out with that premise as a joke, but, regretfully, find more evidence to support that theory than I’d like and none to counter it.”)
But fundamentally, Obama just doesn’t want to deal with terrorism. He wants it to go away.
Bush and Obama started off the same: each had a domestic agenda. The former, to be a “compassionate conservative”; the latter, to re-make America into to the welfare state that Europeans (in American progressives’ minds) know and love.
When 9/11 happened, Bush knew that he couldn’t just proceed with his plans. Whether you agree or disagree with what he did, he understood that he had to engage with the problem. He was transformed.
But Obama hasn’t been transformed. He just wants terrorism to go away, and wants to wish away each successive event as a one-time thing — and accordingly puts in minimal effort. Sort of like what my son does with a homework assignment he doesn’t like, avoiding it or doing a slapdash job unless we stay on him. And there’s no one to stay on Obama like we do with our son.
At least, that’s the optimistic explanation, which I’d rather believe that the alternative, that he’s perfectly fine with radical Islam gaining greater power.
Hmmm. . . has Obama ever been seen eating pork? (Just kidding!)
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