Daniel Henninger: Talking his way onto Mount Rushmore?
... Mr. Obama is not the nation's Speaker in Chief. He's not a senator, and he's no longer a candidate. He's the president. A president's major speeches are different than those of anyone else. That high office imposes demands beyond the power of a podium. Inspiration matters, but the office also requires acts of leadership. A U.S. president's words must be connected to something beyond sentiment and eloquence. Too much of the time, Barack Obama's big speeches don't seem to be connected to anything other than his own interesting thoughts on some subject.
Lincoln's eloquence flowed from the pain of the Civil War. Washington's Farewell Address, perhaps America's greatest political speech, was a magisterial summing up after leading an army to victory in the Revolution and then the nation's beginning. FDR's remembered speeches were pushed into life by the Depression and then world war.
Ronald Reagan's great "tear down this wall" speech in 1987 at the Brandenburg Gate was just one piece in an elaborate Cold War endgame strategy.
LBJ's most famous speech, to a full session of Congress in 1965 a week after the violent civil-rights march in Selma, wasn't just a reflection on civil rights in America but itself a central event.
With one notable exception -- health care -- there is a disconnect between the scale of Mr. Obama's ideas and his actions, and sometimes even reality, as when he says a U.S-Russian commitment to a world without nuclear weapons would be the "legal and moral foundation" for persuading the world's rogues to do the same. What, exactly, comes after the moral foundation?
The Russian "reset" isn't a foreign-policy statement; it's a sentiment. If you were the head of an Islamic nation, what policy conclusion were you supposed to take from that Cairo speech? All past administrations have been willing to talk to adversaries. When he speaks as president, Mr. Obama's audiences have reason to expect that some concrete actions or policies will flow from seemingly major statements. Other than more diplomats talking, I don't think much of anything is going to follow these. The Speech was pretty much it.
Then there is health care. With characteristic eloquence, Mr. Obama defended his federal health-insurance entitlement for the middle class in a major speech to the American Medical Association. If enacted, Mr. Obama's plan would be the most significant piece of social entitlement legislation since 1965, the year Medicare and Medicaid were enacted as the cornerstone of the Great Society.
It may well be that this in fact is the foundation on which Barack Obama intends to build his own vast social vision. If so he will be doing it with no real event or trauma to drive a policy of this scale -- no war, no civil-rights movement. Instead, he is trying to shape a presidency from the force of his own political personality carved out of a mountain of random eloquence. It might work, too.
Read entire article at WSJ
Lincoln's eloquence flowed from the pain of the Civil War. Washington's Farewell Address, perhaps America's greatest political speech, was a magisterial summing up after leading an army to victory in the Revolution and then the nation's beginning. FDR's remembered speeches were pushed into life by the Depression and then world war.
Ronald Reagan's great "tear down this wall" speech in 1987 at the Brandenburg Gate was just one piece in an elaborate Cold War endgame strategy.
LBJ's most famous speech, to a full session of Congress in 1965 a week after the violent civil-rights march in Selma, wasn't just a reflection on civil rights in America but itself a central event.
With one notable exception -- health care -- there is a disconnect between the scale of Mr. Obama's ideas and his actions, and sometimes even reality, as when he says a U.S-Russian commitment to a world without nuclear weapons would be the "legal and moral foundation" for persuading the world's rogues to do the same. What, exactly, comes after the moral foundation?
The Russian "reset" isn't a foreign-policy statement; it's a sentiment. If you were the head of an Islamic nation, what policy conclusion were you supposed to take from that Cairo speech? All past administrations have been willing to talk to adversaries. When he speaks as president, Mr. Obama's audiences have reason to expect that some concrete actions or policies will flow from seemingly major statements. Other than more diplomats talking, I don't think much of anything is going to follow these. The Speech was pretty much it.
Then there is health care. With characteristic eloquence, Mr. Obama defended his federal health-insurance entitlement for the middle class in a major speech to the American Medical Association. If enacted, Mr. Obama's plan would be the most significant piece of social entitlement legislation since 1965, the year Medicare and Medicaid were enacted as the cornerstone of the Great Society.
It may well be that this in fact is the foundation on which Barack Obama intends to build his own vast social vision. If so he will be doing it with no real event or trauma to drive a policy of this scale -- no war, no civil-rights movement. Instead, he is trying to shape a presidency from the force of his own political personality carved out of a mountain of random eloquence. It might work, too.