tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6926413038778731189.post7460500827178746039..comments2023-10-16T07:13:12.123-05:00Comments on A plain blog about politics: Obama In TucsonJonathan Bernsteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15931039630306253241noreply@blogger.comBlogger13125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6926413038778731189.post-41190688171184032712011-01-14T09:05:25.206-06:002011-01-14T09:05:25.206-06:00As I said in the post, "some partisans" ...<i>As I said in the post, "some partisans" are not part of this, but IMO it's really a very small group.</i><br /><br />Jonathan, honey, wake the heck up. A small group? Really? It's the ENTIRE right wing media machine! Look how quickly the term "pep rally" ricocheted around the conservative media. I wonder if that wasn't on some fax-blast issued by the Frank Luntz School Of Republican Talking Points.<br /><br />Give me a break. Small in number? Even if that were true they have a VERY large microphone.Litzz11@yahoo.comhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08843479112124843471noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6926413038778731189.post-49454702906688871382011-01-13T18:42:30.109-06:002011-01-13T18:42:30.109-06:00Obama could find a cure for lung cancer and some p...Obama could find a cure for lung cancer and some political opponents would only complain that he hadn't done a thing about colon cancer. The same could be said for every president before him except Washington, who had no real political opposition. The majority of the American people work out what's what fairly quickly. Give them a chance.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6926413038778731189.post-19185457149214175492011-01-13T17:30:50.925-06:002011-01-13T17:30:50.925-06:00SB and Anon 4:32,
As I said in the post, "so...SB and Anon 4:32,<br /><br />As I said in the post, "some partisans" are not part of this, but IMO it's really a very small group. After all, note that the speech got pretty good reviews from conservatives (who were reduced to attacking the audience...yeesh). Anyway, I'm really not talking about partisan elites, who are essentially paid to produce partisan spin; I'm talking about ordinary citizens.Jonathan Bernsteinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15931039630306253241noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6926413038778731189.post-81693332568779623662011-01-13T16:32:04.490-06:002011-01-13T16:32:04.490-06:00You write that "It's an easy speech beca...You write that "It's an easy speech because everyone watching wants the president to succeed."<br /><br />Are you SERIOUS??? Do you ever listen to the hate-speech spewing out of Rush Limbaugh's gaping pie-hole on a daily basis? The eagerness with which Druge searches for one word in the speech that he can whine about? The insane and nonsensical Politico commentary about Obama "hurting" the federal case agaist the shooter (even as, a few words later, they point out that the President's comments wouldn't affect the case at all)? Sorry, dude, but one thing is crystal clear: There ARE some people who do NOT want this president to succeed. The same people who do NOT want our economy to improve (lest they are forced to give credit to the evil Kenyan anti-colonialst Muslim terrorist-lover)! Those people are not hiding, they are easy to spot: Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, Drudge, the entire staff at National Review, and the list goes on and on. You really need to open your eyes to what is exaclty going on in this country!Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6926413038778731189.post-24896942906977423502011-01-13T13:48:37.525-06:002011-01-13T13:48:37.525-06:00In considering the speech further today, I pondere...In considering the speech further today, I pondered that the necessary objective (from the state's point of view) is to encourage those like Jared Loughner, currently lurking in the shadows, to bring their issues into the public square, where they can be discussed in a way that will not drive those individuals closer to the edge, which is the likely outcome of their current consumption of media. That would have been a good speech focus, I thought, and much better than the whole 'make the world better for little girls' segment that I personally found so emotionally wrenching.<br /><br />But then I read Andrew Sprung's review and I realized that, actually, 'come out of the shadows' was a really big point of emphasis in the speech, e.g. 'expand our moral imaginations', 'listen to each other more carefully', 'remind ourselves...our hopes and dreams are bound together' were all designed precisely to achieve the corporate objective of the night, namely, to get those like Loughner, on the brink of disaster, to come back to the national family.<br /><br />I don't know if others on the brink of disaster got the 'come out of the shadows' message; I sure didn't hear it because I was steamrolled by the 'make the world better for our children' powerhouse. And so perhaps whether these speeches are easy depends on your objective:<br /><br />If you want to push the buttons of your audience, they're a piece of cake. If you want to push forward the important business of the state, you have to do that around and between pushing the aforementioned buttons...not so easy. Not sure how well Obama achieved his "come out of the shadows" objective last night, even though the speech was a masterwork of emotion.CSHnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6926413038778731189.post-44375757719884709192011-01-13T12:55:20.953-06:002011-01-13T12:55:20.953-06:00It's an easy speech because everyone watching ...<i>It's an easy speech because everyone watching wants the president to succeed.</i><br /><br />No they certainly do not! Maybe everyone watching who YOU care about, but if you followed the Twitter-web you would have seen the most vile hateful comments. <br /><br />The one criticism the righties seemed to settle on was that it was crass and unseemly for so many people to be cheering. Brit Hume called it a "pep rally." Yes, the cheers of the audience really chapped some folks' britches. As if anyone has a right to tell Tucson what and how to feel. Glenn Beck gave a backhanded "better late than never" complement - good speech, but he should have said it on Saturday. <br /><br />Worst of all was partisan hack Erik Erickson -- who let's not forget is a freaking CNN correspondent. He not only called it "a pep rally" filled with "sloganeering, bumper stickers, and t-shirts," he then went on to remind us that Obama has "failed at every presidential speech he's ever given as president." You just gotta wonder what the heck he was watching last night ... or even if he even bothered to watch at all.<br /><br />Jonathan, none of these folks on the right have ever wanted President Obama to succeed, not last night, not ever. These aren't crackpot commenters over at the Free Republic, these are pundits and significant personalities with a broad media reach. Leaders of the right. <br /><br />Wake up.Litzz11@yahoo.comhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08843479112124843471noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6926413038778731189.post-14627488452786733862011-01-13T12:15:50.121-06:002011-01-13T12:15:50.121-06:00I'm not sure you need complex theories of repr...I'm not sure you need complex theories of representation to explain what makes speeches of this kind relatively easy. The main thing is that there's no controversy over the basic points in play: Everyone's against mass murder, insanity, random gunfire in public places, the pointless death of children, etc. Everyone's for badly injured people getting better and for national communities being peaceable, not wracked by violence. Naturally, people appreciate hearing these sentiments well-expressed, but I wonder if they're really thinking in terms of the president speaking "for them" or imagining that "in a sense, we're there, present, speaking." I don't feel that way when I listen to presidents, even when I agree with them. Then again, I don't normally feel that what happens in America happens "to me" or is necessarily more important than a lot of other things happening in the world. Maybe it comes from spending a lot of time abroad, and from including non-Americans among my best friends. At any rate, I think the psychology of representation -- when and to what extent people actually project or transfer themselves into public figures -- is probably something we tend to imagine we know a lot more about than we actually do.Jeffnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6926413038778731189.post-41494840631440574672011-01-13T12:02:18.672-06:002011-01-13T12:02:18.672-06:00Oh, dear. I feel churlish saying so, but I found ...Oh, dear. I feel churlish saying so, but I found the speech profoundly unimpressive. It sounded no different from his campaign rhetoric, and some of the most replayed soundbites are treacly nonsense. (How does one use "words that heal" during heated political debate?)<br /><br />I am broadly supportive of the President, and certainly wanted him to "succeed" last night. While I don't think he failed, neither did I find it a moment of historic greatness.Danhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11213051268392108382noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6926413038778731189.post-63259677157139676012011-01-13T11:24:20.170-06:002011-01-13T11:24:20.170-06:00"America is the only nation in the world that..."America is the only nation in the world that is founded on creed." -- G.K. ChestertonMartinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18440356770947146690noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6926413038778731189.post-14509263510881976222011-01-13T10:23:08.793-06:002011-01-13T10:23:08.793-06:00Rhetorical analysis supports your argument: Epidei...Rhetorical analysis supports your argument: Epideictic speeches (those of praise and blame) are specifically oriented toward the listener's judgment of the present, of whether or not this moment is representative of ourselves and who we wish to be. This doesn't mean that it ignores past and future, but that our understanding of where we have come from and where we are going become enframed by how we interpret the here and now. <br /><br />Most political wrangling deals with determining "what has happened" in judicial form and "what will happen" in deliberative form, and these possibilities are often tightly circumscribed by almost innumerable material factors. In the case of the epideictic, however, we are invited to reconstitute our past and future, to choose what is worthy of praise and deserving of shame, based on who we decide to be in the now. And unlike deliberative or judicial speech, which occurs in many places but has the most power when housed in restrictive institutions (the assembly, the court--where only a handful of people are authorized to make decisions about legislation or guilt) the epideictic invites all spectators into the decisionmaking process, and makes them a part of the now. It gives "the public" (usually abstract, patched together, asserted) manifest presence.Thinking of Pericles...noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6926413038778731189.post-68599482697424737352011-01-13T09:50:43.807-06:002011-01-13T09:50:43.807-06:00ASP,
No argument with any of that (or with what y...ASP,<br /><br />No argument with any of that (or with what you and the others I cited said). <br /><br />Anon,<br /><br />If this is 5% of the presidency, then talking about what he wants to do with the country is also about 5% (and, IMO, he's doing fine with that, although of course not everyone agrees with that). Most of being president is not about giving speeches.Jonathan Bernsteinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15931039630306253241noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6926413038778731189.post-71986607671665616162011-01-13T09:38:27.654-06:002011-01-13T09:38:27.654-06:00Amen, brother.
I was going to write Fallows and c...Amen, brother.<br /><br />I was going to write Fallows and call him all out this. I'd go one point further: Obama is really really good at this. I always thought it comes from Obama looking at Bill Clinton, who got a lot of praise for this sort of thing, and thinking "man, this white m-f is so faking it, and I can do better." <br /><br />However, this is only about 5% of the job of being President, and it would be nice to have him show up and, well, actually talk about what he wants to do with the county.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6926413038778731189.post-91902486723785901462011-01-13T09:35:49.211-06:002011-01-13T09:35:49.211-06:00Yes, maybe it's easy to suggest that we pull t...Yes, maybe it's easy to suggest that we pull together as a nation at such times and focus on what unites us rather than on what divides us, and so answer listeners' thirst for a bit of communitas. It's easy to celebrate the heroes and the victims (though O did so concisely, concretely, and without mawkishness). It's even easy to say "let's look forward, not back" as we try to reduce the rancor.<br /><br />What's not so easy is to suggest, without being preachy, that we all look inward rather than continuing to try to diagnose what's wrong with the country's politics. Also not easy: to build slowly, without being maudlin or cheesy, to the point where you're able to say "this country is a family" after having described the diverse people involved in the tragedy (the structure of the event helped here)-- and to have that idea grow out of the suggestion that we all approach this tragedy as we would the loss of a family member.<br /><br />So yes, while it may be easy for a President to get good marks in a situation like this, I suspect Obama went deeper. Along with "a little oratorical skill" is an enormous capacity for *thought.* But then, as a partisan, I went in with a thirst to be 'represented.'Andrew Sprunghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17601269968798865106noreply@blogger.com