February 21, 2009 – 10:57 am
Funny bit here on what to expect (not much) from Oscar acceptance speeches. Evidently emcee Hugh Jackman has some plans to spice up the ceremony “I haven’t told anyone this, but we are going to do most of it naked and we’re going to sing through the whole show,” the affable actor joked during an […]
February 19, 2009 – 5:47 pm
I’m often asked about the path one takes to become a presidential or Cabinet-level speechwriter. There’s no single route, but certainly one of the avenues runs through journalism. Politico has a piece today on the half-dozen journalists who’ve left the media world to join the Obama administration: On Tuesday, Cox’s Scott Shepard joined Sen. John […]
February 19, 2009 – 5:08 pm
Heart-tugging anecdotes are the mother’s milk of political speechwriting. If you’re a Democrat, you love talking about Susan, who can’t get health care and had to give up shoeing her children to buy groceries. (Preferably she lives in the Rust Belt and her husband, Jack, had an assembly-line job until an OSHA-worthy accident left him permanently […]
February 19, 2009 – 1:39 pm
We have the new Attorney-General, Eric Holder, to thank for calling us a “nation of cowards” when it comes to candid discussions of race. On the same day, The New York Post was denounced for an editorial cartoon that depicted Connecticut’s rampaging chimpanzee as the putative author of the stimulus package. “The drawing,” huffs Sam Stein […]
February 18, 2009 – 6:40 pm
Attorney General Eric Holder, speaking today to Department of Justice employees, said, “Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and I believe continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.” Score one for civility. Can Holder really be […]
February 18, 2009 – 1:43 pm
Does any federal government office produce less engaging rhetoric than that of Chairman of the Federal Reserve? Alan Greenspan was famous for his inscrutable public statements. Ben Bernanke, who comes across (to me) as much more personable than Greenspan, employs a workmanlike approach to his speeches that defies listeners to stay tuned for more than a couple of […]
February 18, 2009 – 12:56 pm
President Obama is unveiling his housing rescue plan at a high school in Mesa, Arizona. (Not sure about that venue. If you’re a high-school homeowner you are either very successful or very deceptive. But anyway…) The details of the plan are complicated and the impact likely won’t be known for some time. But the messages […]
February 16, 2009 – 9:36 pm
Worth Reading: This thoughtful piece by novelist Zadie Smith in the New York Review of Books, exploring President Obama’s ability to speak in the “many-colored voice, the multiple sensibility” that we celebrate in our artists but have not typically prized in our politicians. Here’s Jack Shafer’s summary of the Smith piece in Slate. And if […]
February 16, 2009 – 1:59 pm
What better family to hear from on Presidents Day than the Bushes? (OK, maybe the Roosevelts, but I don’t see any of them stepping up.) Fred Barnes’s interview with Jeb Bush in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal offers a glimpse of how Republicans could be packaging themselves as a novel-thinking, reform-minded, fully modern — dare […]
February 16, 2009 – 9:25 am
Happy Presidents Day to presidents old and new. It seems unfair that the president always ends up working on Presidents Day. You’d think he’d qualify for a day off if millions of people around America who have nothing to do with the presidency get to spend the day catching up on “Law and Order” reruns […]
February 13, 2009 – 11:34 am
This chart (hat tip, Power Line) shows the deficit as a percentage of GDP, with a projection for 2009 that includes expenditures under TARP I, TARP II and the Stimulator Pork Package. The most obvious thing is that we’re headed for a deficit over twice as large as under Ronald Reagan, but we hear nary […]
February 12, 2009 – 11:33 pm
It’s not the kind of movie likely to grace the multiplex at the mall, but indie film fans with an interest in oratory might be tempted by “Great Speeches from a Dying World,” a documentary exploring the lives of nine homeless men and women in Seattle. Evidently, each subject’s life is framed by the recitation […]
February 12, 2009 – 4:59 pm
Senator Gregg’s withdrawal from consideration as Commerce Secretary was principled and gracious. It was also smart, in at least two ways. This stimulus is a tar baby for any Republican who might be tempted to be associated with it. Gregg was wise to step away. The second smart thing was declaring up front that this […]
February 12, 2009 – 4:47 pm
My colleague, Kendall Bentz, sends along this hilarious compilation of John Stewart and Jay Leno goofs on Joe Biden, and points out that until and if they figure out how to make fun of Obama, Biden seems to have been designated the comedic fall guy.
