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The unbearable lightness of Obama's administration.
Neither a Hedgehog Nor a FoxBy PEGGY NOONAN Peggy Noonan is beginning to hit the spot. Her observations on the teleprompter are accurate. More and more Obama is becoming a marionette and the teleprompter are the strings in a 21st Century electronic sort of way insofar as Obama responds to the dictates of his teleprompter in the same way a puppet responds to the strings. The distinction though is whether like Hal, the teleprompter gets a life of its own and Obama simply becomes the ventriloquists doll. He is willowy when people yearn for solid, reed-like where they hope for substantial, a bright older brother when they want Papa, cool where they probably prefer warmth. All of which may or may not hurt Barack Obama in time. Lincoln was rawboned, prone to the blues and freakishly tall, with a new-grown beard that refused to become an assertion and remained, for four years, a mere and constant follicular attempt. And he did OK. Such impressions--coolness, slightness--can come to matter only if they capture or express some larger or more meaningful truth. At the moment they connect, for me, to something insubstantial and weightless in the administration's economic pronouncements and policies. The president seems everywhere and nowhere, not fully focused on the matters at hand. He's trying to keep up with the news cycle with less and less to say. "I am angry" about AIG's bonuses. The administration seems buffeted, ad hoc. Policy seems makeshift, provisional. James K. Galbraith captures some of this in The Washington Monthly: "The president has an economic program. But there is, so far, no clear statement of the thinking behind the program." This in part is why the teleprompter trope is taking off. Mr. Obama uses it more than previous presidents. No one would care about this or much notice it as long as he showed competence, and the promise of success. Reagan, if memory serves, once took his cards out of his suit and began to read them at a welcoming ceremony, only to realize a minute or so in that they were last week's cards from last week's ceremony. He caught himself and made a joke of it. One was reminded of this the other day when Mr. Obama's speech got mixed up with the Irish prime minister's. Things happen. But the teleprompter trope has taken off: Why does he always have to depend on that thing? Posted by: Omoter Speaking for Boskone7794 2009-03-20 |
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