The Commander in Chief Has Arrived

By Ed Walsh (WHWG)
February 27, 2009 – 4:23 pm

President Obama’s speech today announcing the future withdrawal of US forces from Iraq was outstanding.

The president struck exactly the right tone – congratulating the assembled Marines on their success while recognizing that we haven’t quite put a ribbon on the whole project just yet.

While Democrats (I’m looking at you, Harry Reid) have too often projected an image of America limping toward the finish in Iraq, President Obama emphasized that what US service members have accomplished should be considered a victory – a realization of goals:

“[T]here should be no disagreement on what the men and women of our military have achieved…. We sent our troops to Iraq to do away with Saddam Hussein’s regime – and you got the job done. We kept our troops in Iraq to help establish a sovereign government – and you got the job done. And we will leave the Iraqi people with a hard-earned opportunity to live a better life – that is your achievement; that is the prospect that you have made possible.

It was refreshing to hear someone from the left describe the project in Iraq as one that was not aimless, hopeless, or ignoble, but one that will benefit Iraqis in tangible ways. Read More »

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Tracking the Presidents’ Words

By Ed Walsh (WHWG)
February 27, 2009 – 10:15 am

If you’re interested in nerdy speech algorithms (and who isn’t, am I right?), consider taking a look at Speech Wars, a web site that not only offers States of the Union and Inaugural Addresses going back to the beginning of the country, but also allows you to find out how frequently particular words have been used in those speeches.

For instance, as the Speech Wars creators mentioned to the Freakonomics guys this week, President Obama “is the first president in history to use the words ‘bailouts,’ ‘laundry,’ ‘drapes,’ ‘cyber,’ ‘messes,’ and ‘pandemic’ in a State of the Union address.” (Even though this wasn’t technically a SOTU.)

He’s the second to use “ferret.”

I played around with a few terms. According to the site, Gerald Ford is the last president to use the word “Christian” in a State of the Union (1976), while George W. Bush was the first to use “Muslim” (2007). This exposed a slight drawback to the site, though, because searching for “Moslem” actually produced two more hits — Rutherford Hayes (1880) and Jimmy Carter (1980).

Since President Obama created a bit of a flap by mentioning automobiles this year, I searched for that term and discovered that Teddy Roosevelt was the first to use it in its modern form (1907). And, wouldn’t you know, his words ring especially true today:

“No legislation can by any possibility guarantee the business community against the results of speculative folly any more than it can guarantee an individual against the results of his extravagance. When an individual mortgages his house to buy an automobile he invites disaster.”

(Hat tip: John Bailey)

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A Troubled Inheritance

By Ed Walsh (WHWG)
February 26, 2009 – 3:17 pm

2010-budgetIn case you missed it, Barack Obama had absolutely nothing to do with the budget deficit weighing like a rock on his efforts to lead America out of darkness.

President Obama’s favorite word these days is “inherited.” It modifies the word “deficit” almost every time the president utters it. In this week’s address to a joint session of Congress, the “inherited deficit” even got a standing ovation from some Members, including Chuck Schumer.

Which makes you wonder: Where were all those Members as the deficit was being bundled up and bequeathed to the new Administration? For that matter, where was Mr. Obama? Rumor has it, Congress gets a vote on budgets. And Senator Obama actually voted for deficits that he ended up inheriting. There’s a kick in the pants.

In case there is any lingering doubt that the budget deficit isn’t the creation of the new Administration, the president’s message accompanying his new budget — which is titled “A New Era of Responsibility” — sets a new standard for driving the idea home.

On page 3, the word “inherited” is included twice in the same sentence — once to modify deficit and once to modify debt. The word is also used on page 2 as a modifier of “crisis.” And just so you don’t miss the point, the first section of the budget summary is headlined “INHERITING A LEGACY OF MISPLACED PRIORITIES” (caps theirs).

I guess the “new era of responsibility” starts with absolving the president of any responsibility for the actions he took in his old job.

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Third Time’s the Charm?

By Ed Walsh (WHWG)
February 25, 2009 – 5:50 pm

Today, President Obama nominated his third candidate for Commerce Secretary, former Washington governor Gary Locke. Recognizing the “three strikes” pressure weighing on the nomination, the president smartly joked: “I’m sure it’s not lost on anyone that we’ve tried this a couple of times, but I’m a big believer in keeping at something until you get it right.”

Obama went on to describe Locke as “the right man for this job.”

Of course, a few weeks ago, he also called Judd Gregg “the right person to help guide the department.”

And many, many months ago he assured us that Bill Richardson was “uniquely suited for this role.”

I’m sure there are many people who are “right” for the job of Commerce Secretary — just as there were several outstanding Mr. Elizabeth Taylors. But if Governor Locke doesn’t work out, I’d suggest hedging the language a bit the next time around.

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Masala Gumbo

By Mark W. Davis (WHWG)
February 25, 2009 – 12:11 pm

whackamoleIt is one of the hardest assignments in politics–to give the official response of the loyal opposition following the State of the Union address.

The SOU, by contrast, is a guaranteed lovefest.  All the president has to do is to deliver one well-crafted applause line after another, lines designed to compel Members of Congress to bob up and down like so many Whack-a-Moles.  The whole event is staged to create a warm bath of applause and approbation.

The responder, however, is in a cold empty room staring at teleprompter.  There is no one to laugh or applaud.  If he is over-animated–if he delivers his applause lines as if he is expecting applause, or delivers his jokes as if he is expecting a laugh–he will sound deranged.  On the other hand, if he is too focused on the camera, he can come across as wooden.

Worst of all, the responder cannot know in advance exactly what he is responding to.  While the president can be very specific, the responder must give a speech that is necessarily vague on the details.

It is not an easy thing to do.  But Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal managed to pull it off.  He was as conversational, warm and funny as the format would allow.  He joked about being born on the “installment plan” (fortunately, he said, his father “never missed a payment”).  He repeated the old saw about half of Louisiana being under water and the other half under indictment.

He also said the right things. Read More »

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“Those Days Are Over”

By Ed Walsh (WHWG)
February 25, 2009 – 3:08 am

obama-joint-sessionPresident Obama’s address in Congress last night was fine, if a little repetitive. Not repetitive of itself, but of the same messages we’ve been hearing for months (and from both Administrations, really). Economy’s rough, bad loans, losing jobs, taking action, improving credit, preventing foreclosures, holding scoundrels accountable.

And of course there was the laundry list of problems that have to be dealt with: health care, energy, education, etc. The same list that every president highlights, then tries to tackle (with great vigor and hope for bipartisan success), then finds largely impossible to conquer because it turns out not everybody agrees on how to handle these problems. Slowly the country progresses, just like the Founders intended.

What caught my ear, though, was that last night’s speech seemed to be a great big gust of animosity and bitterness about the last eight years, sucked up and expelled (on behalf of Democrats everywhere) by President Obama. Read More »

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Steeling for a Primary

By Ed Walsh (WHWG)
February 24, 2009 – 5:33 pm

steeleLast week, new RNC chairman Michael Steele generated some buzz when he said in a Washington Times interview that Republicans would be developing an “off-the-hook” messaging strategy to connect to a wider cross-section of voters.

More interesting, I thought, was Steele’s assertion that developing a deep bench of prospective GOP candidates would be his top priority, rather than enforcing policy orthodoxy in Congress. To quote: “I don’t plan to dictate policy under any circumstance. What I can do is tell them how the party base feels about the policies they will have to confront, like the stimulus bill.”

But yesterday, with Fox News’s Neil Cavuto (and mentioned in Politico, where I saw it), Steele suggested he’d be open to having the RNC support primary challengers to the three Republican senators who voted for the stimulus bill: “My responsibility is to follow the lead of the state parties, to get their advice, what their intent is. Those senators are going to have to account to those voters there.”

Indeed, the senators will have to account to the voters in their states. And if a primary challenge is in order, so be it. But the chairman should be careful about sending mixed messages. You can’t simultaneously say you won’t “dictate policy” and threaten retribution against party members who don’t vote a particular way on a particular bill. When you do that, you are, in effect, dictating policy.

The party’s decision to support primary challengers should be based on a variety of factors, including a member’s overall voting record. To single out specific votes would have a chilling effect on thought and speech within the party.

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Sort of SOTU-ish

By Ed Walsh (WHWG)
February 24, 2009 – 4:20 pm

This evening President Obama will address a joint session of Congress, the speech which is usually a State of the Union address, except when it’s the president’s first year in office. No one wants to saddle the new guy with having to report on the state of a union he’s just taken charge of.

This year, that’s probably a good thing. Presidents typically include a line that begins, “My fellow Americans, the state of our union is” and concludes with a word falling somewhere between “strong” and “unbelievably awesome.”

Given the events of the last six months – and the pesky wars that insist on intruding into polite company – it would be harder to pull that off with a straight face tonight. Instead, President Obama would probably have to say something like, “The state of our union is…

… kind of crappy.”

… mildly hopey with an 80% chance of change.”

… dependent on Chinese consumers.”

… better than the UK, so that still looks like a good decision.”

… like you the morning after your brother’s wedding.”

… still crazy after all these years.”

… eh.”

Read More »

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Words Have No Meaning

By Josh Gilder (WHWG)
February 24, 2009 – 10:23 am

I’ve written before about the increasing disjunction between what Obama says and what he does. As Ed points out, however, the problem may be more basic – a complete inconsistency in thought that allows him to state two completely incompatible ideas in the same speech, if not quite the same sentence or paragraph, to wit: we’re going to spend trillions of dollars on wasteful government programs and cut the deficit in half by trimming wasteful government spending.

In fact, this problem is not new. If we cast our memory back to the Democratic debate in Philadelphia, there was a particularly pertinent exchange between Charlie Gibson and Obama on the subject of Capital Gains taxes. Gibson, surprisingly, made a clear statement of the historical facts, i.e. that when Capital Gains tax rates are lowered, revenue goes up, when they’re raised, revenues go down. “So why raise it at all,” Gibson asked, “especially given the fact that 100 million people in this country own stock and would be affected?”

Obama answered somewhat cluelessly that he would raise capital gains tax rates for purposes of “fairness” and also to raise revenue. Gibson to his credit didn’t let it go: “But history shows that when you drop the capital gains tax, the revenues go up.”
Obama’s answer is especially pertinent today:

SENATOR OBAMA: Well, that might happen or it might not. It depends on what’s happening on Wall Street and how business is going. I think the biggest problem that we’ve got on Wall Street right now is the fact that we’ve got a housing crisis that this president has not been attentive to and that it took John McCain three tries before he got it right.

And if we can stabilize that market and we can get credit flowing again, then I think we’ll see stocks do well, and once again I think we can generate the revenue that we need to run this government and hopefully to pay down some of this debt.

So here were are a year later, the markets are in free fall, we’ve just experienced the most massive destruction of wealth and savings we’ve seen in our life-times, credit is frozen, and Obama still wants to raise the capital gains tax?

One suspects that there’s an underlying ideological imperative that demands that he “raise taxes on the rich” no matter what the consequences, just as he’ll cut the military budget, cancel deployments of missile defense and spend trillions with no plausible stimulus effect, regardless of the consequences. Then he’ll make up a bunch of rationalizations that suit his needs of the moment. But he doesn’t believe what he says, and pretty soon no one else will either, because they’re all just a bunch of words with no real meaning.

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I Would Like to Thank Barbara Walraff

By Ed Walsh (WHWG)
February 23, 2009 – 5:23 pm

“I would like to thank” is one of those standard phrases used in just about any speech in which acknowledgments are necessary. But it always sounds … wrong. Too clunky or indirect. Yet it’s hard to come up with better options. “Thank you, X” sounds a bit too robotic.

I remember early in the most recent Bush Administration a directive went out to the speechwriting office that we shouldn’t write “I would like to thank” or “I want to thank” because the president wanted to just “thank.” But apparently he couldn’t think of a way around it either because, whether we wrote it or not, he would invariably use one of those phrases (or both, and often multiple times) in the course of acknowledgments.

Laura Bush was better. She usually avoided the construction by replacing it with “Thanks to X.” Not robotic. No wasted words. Kind of kicky. But not always appropriate because it can come off a little too casual.

So good news today from The Atlantic‘s word guru, Barbara Walraff, who writes on her blog that “I would like to thank” is a perfectly acceptable, direct enough way for speechgivers to thank people. Turns out it’s an “implicit performative utterance.” Who knew?

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A $700 Billion “Failure to Act”

By Ed Walsh (WHWG)
February 23, 2009 – 4:32 pm

I’ve noted before that President Obama suffers from a bit of message schizophrenia when it comes to government spending. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad. Sometimes we’ve had too much, sometimes we haven’t had enough.

This was on display again this morning as the president made opening remarks at his Fiscal Responsibility Summit. The topline message for the day: Spending is bad. Debts for children are bad. The deficit is monstrous. It’s time to get serious and end the gimmicks.

As the president noted: “This administration has inherited a $1.3 trillion deficit — the largest in our nation’s history and our investments to rescue our economy will add to that deficit in the short-term…. Contrary to the prevailing wisdom in Washington these past few years, we cannot simply spend as we please and defer the consequences to the next budget, the next administration or the next generation.”

Fine enough. We get it. Congress spent too much “these past few years” and left you in a budgetary pickle.

But wait! President Obama also tells us: “We’re not going to be able to fall back into the same old habits, and make the same inexcusable mistakes, the repeated failure to act as our economy spiraled deeper into crisis.”

What now? Repeated failure to act? What about that $700 billion TARP financial-system rescue package? You know, the one that contributed more than half of the “inherited deficit” that proves Congress was “spending as it pleased” and “deferring the consequences to the next budget”? Seems like a pretty consequential action.

Sure, every politician wants to communicate the idea that his spending is good and the other party’s is bad. And it sure is easy to blame the deficit on the previous Administration’s profligacy without acknowledging the exigent circumstances that contributed to the deficits. But if President Obama wants to have credibility when he talks about spending matters, he ought to stop using his own rhetorical gimmicks that serve only to shade the truth and reignite the same arguments we’ve been hearing for decades.

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Thank you, thank you

By Vinca LaFleur (WWW)
February 21, 2009 – 10:57 am

oscarFunny 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 interview backstage at the Kodak Theatre. “In fact, all the acceptance speeches are going to be sung. There will be some interpretive dance behind them, and I really think it will be beautiful and touching.”

Read more from Hugh in today’s Washington Post.

And more on Oscar acceptance speeches, including video from some of the likely winners (Kate Winslet, Danny Boyle, Mickey Rourke) courtesy of Katey Rich at Cinemablend.com, here.

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For Congress So Loved the World…

By Ed Walsh (WHWG)
February 19, 2009 – 7:49 pm

Politico‘s Jonathan Martin reports on a new ad campaign by the American Issues Project, which seeks to put the stimulus plan in perspective. The power line: “Suppose you spent $1 million every single day starting from the day Jesus was born — and kept spending through today. A million dollars a day for more than 2,000 years. You would still have spent less money than Congress just did.”

That’s pretty good stuff. Yes, some people will question the necessity of introducing the name Jesus to this whole debate. But the historical concept of how long ago Jesus existed is something that resonates with most Americans.

You know what this means, don’t you? If you had bought 200,000 five dollar footlongs a day for the past two thousand years, you’d still have money left over for a Snuggie.

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Reporting for Duty

By Vinca LaFleur (WWW)
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 Kerry’s office as a speechwriter, becoming the second journalist this year to take a job under the Massachusetts Democrat. Investigative reporter Doug Frantz is now chief investigator under the Kerry-helmed Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

A week before [Jill] Zuckman announced that she’s headed for Obama’s Transportation Department, her Tribune colleague Peter Gosselin signed on as speechwriter for Obama’s treasury secretary, Tim Geithner.

In December, Jay Carney relinquished his perch as Time’s Washington bureau chief to become Vice President Joe Biden’s press secretary. Warren Bass left the Washington Post’s Outlook section to write speeches and advise Dr. Susan Rice at the United Nations. Daniel W. Reilly left Politico to become communications director for Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) Linda Douglass left the National Journal for the Obama campaign back in May, and is expected to become assistant secretary for public affairs in the department of Health and Human Services.

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You Oughta Be in Speeches

By Ed Walsh (WHWG)
February 19, 2009 – 5:08 pm

weepHeart-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 disabled.)

If you’re a Republican, you get worked up about Bob, who’s trying to expand his small business (which specializes in something very manly like construction or accounting), but can’t because his taxes are too high and the regulatory hassle of adding employees is enough to make him spit nails. (His wife, Connie, is a schoolteacher who wants more freedom in the classroom instead of being stifled by union rules.)

In these tough economic times, you would expect stories like these to abound and to be used liberally (in every sense of the word) in speeches. And now we have a growing repository of them at Organizing for America, the non-governmental political wing of the Obama machine.

Here you can meet Jaydee from Missouri, a single mom who’s lost multiple jobs. And Matthew from Illinois, whose home equity tanked, leaving him “one illness or job loss away” from being out on his keister. And Ann from North Carolina, a retiree who lives frugally, has a 74 year-old husband working part-time, and (honest to God) runs an environmental awareness group in her spare time. Does it get any better than this?

Speechwriters (and givers) LOVE to feast on other people’s suffering. To our brethren everywhere, enjoy the buffet.

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