As pro-abortion President Barack Obama, thankfully, approaches the end of his second term, he is busy polishing his “legacy” and (feeling his oats) beginning to offer snarky comments about not just the usual suspects–anyone who disagrees with him, most particularly Republicans–but about Donald Trump who will be Hillary Clinton’s opponent this fall.
By now you’ve probably seen the video of Mr. Obama in Indiana yesterday, trying to make the case that if elected, Mr. Trump will undo all the wonderfulness of Obama’s eight years.
It’s never been a secret that it’s always an adventure when Mr. Obama is not reading off of a teleprompter. But in this case, it’s as if Obama’s thoughts are in the equivalent of what in baseball is called a “pickle”: caught between first and second base, his words desperately race back and forth, forth and back, vainly in search of coherence.
Since we have been told even before he became president that Obama is incredibly brilliant and articulate, to boot, how do defenders reconcile Obama’s off-the-cuff verbal gobbledygook with his image as the smartest guy in the room?
One of the commentators reminded us how today by linking to a 2011 piece by a Los Angeles Times columnist, headlined, “Obama’s fast brain vs. slow mouth.”
Admittedly, the president is given to a lot of pauses, “uhs” and sputtering starts to his sentences. As polished as he often is before large crowds (where the adjective “soaring” is often applied to his speeches), his impromptu speaking frequently calls to mind a doctoral candidate delivering a wobbly dissertation defense.
But as always the case with President Obama, what in anyone else’s case would be deemed a weakness is, in truth, a sign of his superiority.
But consider this: It’s not that Obama can’t speak clearly. It’s that he employs the intellectual stammer. Not to be confused with a stutter, which the president decidedly does not have, the intellectual stammer signals a brain that is moving so fast that the mouth can’t keep up. The stammer is commonly found among university professors, characters in Woody Allen movies and public thinkers of the sort that might appear on C-SPAN but not CNN. If you’re a member or a fan of that subset, chances are the president’s stammer doesn’t bother you; in fact, you might even love him for it (he sounds just like your grad school roommate, especially when he drank too much Scotch and attempted to expound on the Hegelian dialectic!).
No, the previous quote was not from the parody publication, The Onion, it actually appeared in print five years ago.
And, by the way, I did have grad school friends (not roommates) and none of them sounded like this.
Chelsea Garcia is a political writer with a special interest in international relations and social issues. Events surrounding the war in Ukraine and the war in Israel are a major focus for political journalists. But as a former local reporter, she is also interested in national politics.
Chelsea Garcia studied media, communication and political science in Texas, USA, and learned the journalistic trade during an internship at a daily newspaper. In addition to her political writing, she is pursuing a master's degree in multimedia and writing at Texas.
