Can a speech once again help Barack Obama hit the reset button and propel him out of a political hole? MSNBC’s First Read raises an important point:
*** Obama’s back against the wall (again): In the five years since Barack Obama has become a fixture on the national stage, he has followed this script when the going gets tough: He gives a speech. He did it during the 2008 presidential campaign (Jeremiah Wright), as well as in his first two years as president (during the health-care debate and the BP spill). And now after his toughest stretch in the White House since the debt-ceiling debacle — the May jobs report, the Democrats’ loss in Wisconsin, and “the private sector is doing fine” — President Obama is set to deliver a major campaign speech on the economy in Cleveland, OH at 1:45 pm ET. The speech is intended to do what all those other examples were supposed to do: change the negative narrative, even if temporarily. In THIS speech, per the campaign, the president will mention (as he’s said before at some recent fundraisers) the stark contrast on the economy between the two presidential candidates, and he’ll say that this election has the chance to “break the stalemate” between the two parties on how to fix the economy and pay down the debt. Here’s the thing about Obama’s speeches, though: This appears to be his team’s only play sometimes. They’ve worked in the past, of course. But the question becomes: If you continually give a speech when your back is against the wall, does it inevitably have less of an impact?
The answer is this: if his speech mean it’s something that shows he is passionate about being re-elected, it will fail. Americans know that when Obama wants to deliver a passionate speech he can — which is why other occasions when he seems listless create such a stark contrast. He has not shown the consistency of a John F. Kennedy, Jr.
More than ever, pundits and Americans are looking for actual content. Romney as the challenger can get off a lot eaiser packaging himself as an alternative to a President who is presiding over troubled times that many Americans don’t feel are getting better — or not better fast enough.
Obama will have to make a thoughtful, compelling case.
Not a speech that wows ’em as a speech.
But a speech that actually does something you scarely see anymore — appeals to reason and makes an affirmative case for HIM versus the case against the alternative to him.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.