WSJ on the President's Afghanistan Address

Not really too much to add to this one. But I have to point out the money quote:

"True, Obama was persuasive enough to get elected president--but that was with a hapless opponent, a dour nepotist as his intraparty rival, a public fed up with the other party, and a media-driven cult of personality."

Read the original here.
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Why is the World's Greatest Orator such a dreadful rhetorician?By JAMES TARANTO

(Note: We're going fishing tomorrow, to return Monday. In the meantime, you may find occasional witticisms at our Twitter feed.)

Not that anybody's asking, but no, we didn't watch President Obama's speech last night announcing his latest recalibration of his Afghanistan policy to adapt to the changing conditions of the 2012 electoral battlefield. It's been a long time since we found this president's speeches worth staying home to see.

To judge by the reviews we've read, last night's performance was a political failure, precisely because it was so transparently political. Obama didn't go nearly far enough to satisfy the isolationists who want a complete pullout yesterday, but he went far enough in their direction that Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified to Congress today: "The President's decisions are more aggressive and incur more risk than I was originally prepared to accept."

It's possible that the president is more attuned to popular sentiment than are the generals, the activists and the commentators who are concerned with the actual merits of the policy. Afghanistan is not uppermost in most Americans' minds. Undeniably there is, among the general public, a general sense of war-weariness, a drift toward isolationism, which contributed to Obama's election as president. On the other hand, that drift could easily lurch in the other direction if the situation in Afghanistan worsens, and especially if terrorists hit America again. To the extent that the Obama pullback makes that more likely, it puts his re-election prospects as well as the country at greater risk.

Anyway, if Obama is following popular sentiment, he certainly isn't leading it. And has he ever managed to do that? The New York Times's incoherent mishmash of an editorial on the speech tries to damn him with faint praise: "At his best, the president can be hugely persuasive." But even that praise is highly unpersuasive. True, Obama was persuasive enough to get elected president--but that was with a hapless opponent, a dour nepotist as his intraparty rival, a public fed up with the other party, and a media-driven cult of personality.

Part of that cult of personality is the myth that he is the World's Greatest Orator, a myth the Times evokes with its hazy recollections of times when he was "highly persuasive." When was he highly persuasive? When he sold the public on the so-called stimulus and ObamaCare? When he campaigned for Democrats in 2010? When he rallied public support for his last change in Afghan policy, an increase in the U.S. troop presence?

The truth is, there's an Emperor's New Clothes aspect to Obama's supposed status as the World's Greatest Orator. We've heard the myth of his eloquence over and over, yet he keeps "unexpectedly" making gaffes or tin-eared statements. Here's the big one from his speech last night: "America, it is time to focus on nation building here at home."

The term "nation building" was popularized by George W. Bush during a 2000 presidential debate with then-Vice President Al Gore. The soon-to-be president used it as a term of derision:
The vice president and I have a disagreement about the use of troops. He believes in nation building. I would be very careful about using our troops as nation builders. I believe the role of the military is to fight and win war and therefore prevent war from happening in the first place. . . .
If we don't have a clear vision of the military, if we don't stop extending our troops all around the world and nation building missions, then we're going to have a serious problem coming down the road, and I'm going to prevent that. I'm going to rebuild our military power. It's one of the major priorities of my administration.

Bush himself was subsequently accused of "nation building" in Afghanistan and Iraq, after the attacks of 9/11 caused a dramatic change in the course of his presidency. Whatever the merits of those criticisms, though, Bush's view of "nation building" as a vain, costly and wasteful distraction from national security seems to have prevailed.

So why in the world would Obama expect a call for "nation building at home" to resonate? Not only is nation building a discredited idea, but the implication is that the U.S. is a pathetic wreck of a country like Kosovo or Afghanistan or Iraq. Undeniably, America has its problems, but many of them are caused or aggravated by an obtrusive government. We don't need to be "built," just left alone to maintain and reinvigorate ourselves.

The answer appears to be that once again, the World's Greatest Orator is taking his rhetorical cues from the Worst Writer in the English Language. Remember the "Sputnik moment," the trope in Obama's State of the Union Address that was supposed to inspire us to get excited about whatever boondoggles he's pushing this year? Neither did we; we have to delve into our archives to be reminded of the details.

But we remembered who used that forgettable phrase first: Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. And Commentary's Abe Greenwald reminds us that "nation building at home" is another of Friedman's tropes. On Nov. 28, 2010, Reason's Matt Welch noted that in Friedman's column of that day, "the phrase 'nation-building at home' makes two appearances, 'nation-building in America' makes two more, and there's a fifth 'nation-building' in there, presumably for collectors."

Noting that Friedman had been beating that drum for 2½ years, Welch titled his post "Thomas L. Friedman: Nation-Building at Home Just as Crucial a Slogan Now as it Was 14 Columns Ago." Make that 15. On March 23, Friedman wrote: "If the president is ready to take some big, hard, urgent, decisions, shouldn't they be first about nation-building in America, not in Libya?"

Still, that's only one column in almost seven months, vs. almost one every other month in the period before Welch noted it. And Friedman has not mentioned Sputnik in any column since we called him on that one after the State of the Union.

How can anyone take seriously Barack Obama's status as the World's Greatest Orator when he uses Friedmanisms that have become so Friedmanistic that even Friedman avoids them?