Breaking the Obama code

During tonight’s State of the Union address, I finally realized why Barack Obama’s speeches drive me crazy. It’s not what he says (although I disagree with, well, almost everything he says). It’s the way he says them.

Tonight, he addressed the American people, and he addressed Congress. Go back and look at the speech. He was earnest, and his chin was down, his head relatively level, when speaking to Congress. When he spoke to us, his chin rose, and he talked down to us—literally.

Go ahead. Take a look. Note his posture. You’ll see it, too. You and I, we are not his equals. He is above us.

That’s what sets my teeth on edge every time I listen to him.

Instalink! Thanks, Glenn.

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18 Responses to Breaking the Obama code

  1. newton says:

    I think you’re correct. He’s a ruler, not a leader. He was looking down on us plebeians – How dare we challenge him?

    He’s a one-termer. I guarantee it.

  2. Michael Lonie says:

    Unless there are enough twits in the USA who actually want to be serfs.

  3. SenatorMark4 says:

    I think you’re really reading too much into his posture. I told people when he was coming up that he didn’t scare me at all because he was nothing but a puppet for someone who would shock the American conscience when they became known. All you’re seeing is that handler resting his hands when the streams of sheeple food are getting too tedious even for him/her. Duh. Won’t be long now until they fall into the stage lights.

  4. HuH?SoSilly says:

    Oh this is just silly…

  5. Rob says:

    Yea, how dare Americans elect a president who exhibits some intellect. Give us a guy like Bush who, though born with a silver spoon in his mouth, has that common man touch. So what if he put the country in the toilet.

  6. So, just to be clear, showing condescension is equivalent to exhibiting intellect?

    Uh-huh.

  7. Rob says:

    I don’t see him “showing condescension”. He correctly described the paralysis that partisanship and political considerations have wreaked on our country, at a time when we can ill afford it. I think he challenged both parties to do better.

  8. elaine says:

    And who’s been partisan? The democrats — in spite of their *public* rhetoric to the contrary — didn’t need the Republicans’ help in order to pass any of their legislative agenda. So how could the Republicans have POSSIBLY been obstructionist? What stopped the dems from passing their precious healthcare bill was all of us plebes contacting our representatives and showing up at town halls. And the dems refused to even acknowledge our existence, much less pay us any heed.

    Welp… Obama’s now trying to pretend he’s one of US, but we know better.

  9. Johnv2 says:

    What about Obama’s own partisanship and political considerations? Let him lead with actions, not mere words, then he can challenge others.

  10. Gary Rosen says:

    “He correctly described the paralysis that partisanship and political considerations have wreaked on our country”

    Right, and Axelrod and Emanuel are going to lead us out of it bwahahaha.

  11. sabbahillel says:

    I don’t see him “showing condescension”. He correctly described the paralysis that partisanship and political considerations have wreaked on our country, at a time when we can ill afford it.

    So he described what he has done and is doing accurately? Why should we support “more of the same”. From what I have read about “body language”, it is more honest than the words that he mouths. Perhaps it is not “condescension” but fear that enough people will recognize what he is attempting that they will be able to stop him. Or perhaps it is the arrogance of thinking that no matter what we do, it is too late.

  12. physics geek says:

    You and I, we are not his equals. He is above us.

    You’re not the only one who noticed that. Interesting attitude for an employee to take with his employers.

  13. Kerry L says:

    I noted the Mussolini chin thrust early on in the campaign. As for bipartisan efforts, I believe his first attempt in that area came out as, “I won. I’m going to trump you on that.”. I know nothing makes me want to cooperate more than arrogant triumphalism.

  14. diane says:

    This isn’t something he did just in this speech – I noted the same thing during the campaign and since. I swear every photo or video of him I’ve seen is what I call a “nostril shot” – always, always taken from a vantage point below him, looking up, as a penitant looking at a savior.

    If there was ever a false characterization…

  15. Rob says:

    re: sabbahillel
    “Why should we support “more of the same”.”

    You’ve got to be joking. We should return to the Republican /Bush policies that put the country in the worst shape it’s been in during my lifetime?

    Obama walked in to a mess. Consumers were afraid to spend money, businesses were afraid to spend money. The only possibility to revive the economy was for the gov’t to pump some money in to the economy. This followed the successful FDR strategy to end the Depression, as opposed to the Hoover strategy of doing nothing and waiting for the business cycle to turn upward.

    Despite his enemies portrayals, Obama is NOT an ideologue. He is pragmatic, much to the dismay of the liberal wing of his own party. The current polarization in US politics has made it impossible to tackle any difficult problem, and we have plenty, that face us. We really can’t afford to let things deteriorate, yet our system does not seem capable of resolving difficult issues. This will be our ruination.

    Whether it be Clinton’s health care plan or Bush’s overhaul of Social Security or Obama’s programs, it is so much easier for the opposition Democrat or Republican, to scare the hell out of the population & sabotage new initiatives than to do the difficult work of forging a consensus that will improve our lives.

    The facile name calling that is pervasive on these boards is a sad commentary on current day American politics.

    Forgive my rant.

  16. You know, Rob, you have a pretty good grasp of the issues, but I think you have a blind spot where Obama is concerned. “Pragmatic” is not an adjective I’d use to describe him.

    When you say “Obama walked into a mess,” you’re absolutely right. Things were not so great when he became president. But I would like to ask you, who controlled Congress the last two years of the Bush Administration? Who controlled Congress through the overwhelming majority of the last sixty or so years? How is it that liberals remember only the few years that the Republicans controlled Congress and forget that Ted Kennedy was a senator for nearly fifty years?

    The polarization has gotten more extreme in recent years, yes. But let’s not pretend that Barack Obama isn’t a large part of that. He has consistently shut out Republicans on every major piece of legislation since he took office, as have Pelosi and Reid. They’re not even trying to be “post-partisan,” which I believe is a phrase that Obama used frequently on the campaign trail.

    Rant away. So long as you don’t attack other users here, I’m fine with having you spice up the conversation here. I’d love to be proven wrong about our president, but I fear I won’t be.

  17. Rob says:

    My problem with a lot of the criticisms is that they are simplistic complaints to complex problems. When the economy tanked & everybody worried about the a possible depression, both the outgoing Bush administration & the incoming Obama administration judged that the gov’t needed to step in & halt the possible cascading fall of large financial institutions to keep the economy from completely unraveling. Yes, it was recognized that there were the issues of moral hazard & a ballooning national debt, but the consensus was that we would have to deal with that later, The urgent priority was to restore stability.

    I fault Republicans , who did nothing to stop Bush from growing the deficit, at a time when we were not in an emergency situation, for now attacking Obama for putting us further into debt. Once they lost their virginity on deficit spending, you can’t reclaim it. I fault Democrats for turning the stimulus package into a grab bag for every dollar they could get for there constituency, whether or not it was in line with the intended purpose of providing jobs.

    I don’t want to pick on Republicans only, but the tone of this blog is that they are saints & the Dems are sinners. I would just like those who think that way to remember –

    “Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill was told “deficits don’t matter” when he warned of a looming fiscal crisis.
    O’Neill, fired in a shakeup of Bush’s economic team in December 2002, raised objections to a new round of tax cuts and said the president balked at his more aggressive plan to combat corporate crime after a string of accounting scandals because of opposition from “the corporate crowd,” a key constituency.
    O’Neill said he tried to warn Vice President Dick Cheney that growing budget deficits-expected to top $500 billion this fiscal year alone-posed a threat to the economy. Cheney cut him off. “You know, Paul, Reagan proved deficits don’t matter,” he said, according to excerpts. Cheney continued: “We won the midterms (congressional elections). This is our due.” A month later, Cheney told the Treasury secretary he was fired.” http://www.ontheissues.org/2004/Dick_Cheney_Budget_+_Economy.htm

    Thus, it seems hypocritical to now act as the deficit is the only thing that matters.

    It seems easy to create devastating sound bites. It is more difficult to provide more nuanced explanations of why a policy that will cause some pain, is beneficial in the long run. Yet, in the current polarized political climate, it is suicide for the President or Congress to ask anyone to accept a little pain for the overall good of the country. In such a climate we will never make headway in solving our problems.

  18. Jack says:

    Rob – The blog here is a right leaning blog, so yes it will seem to paint the Democrats in a negative light more than the Republicans, because that is just how it goes, the opinions of everyone are tainted by their own individual beliefs.

    You cannot, however, take what the leaders of a party does and paint all of the people with the same brush. I myself am very Conservative. I railed against the spending the Government has done for the last 20 years I have been paying attention to politics. Just as the Democrats complaigned about Bush spending as he did, but now are not worried about it, show the hypocrisy of the Left.

    The last decade was not nearly as bad as the Media and the Democrats want us to believe. Unemployment averaged out to 5.6% for that decade, even with the major attack to our financial institutions. Increase in Scientific discoveries, increases in life expectancy, and over all health of those in America grew during the last decade. Yes it unraveled at the end, but really why was that? Maybe because of the taxes that were imposed on cigarettes, Gas, Diesel and other things once the Democrats got control of the congress and were able to write the bills? If you look at a graph of the unemployment from the last decade you will see a sharp increase once Democrats gained control of the houses, now why would that happen? We had the same President after all, we just changed Congress over to a new party for leadership.

    Democrats have controlled the congress since 2006, Obama (who was part of that congress) voted for everything that we have now or had a chance too, anyway. If he was not so busy campaigning for a job he apparently did not want or knew how to do. You cannot go almost 2 years campaigning for the job, to get it and then go, well the last guy really screwed it up for me. He spent a lot of time and effort (500 million dollars) to get the job he now holds and his whining about what problems he walked into are getting old.

    The most problems that people have with this Administration is that they campaigned on openness, bi-partisanship, and a change to the behavior in Washington, I am speaking mostly about the independents that are leaving Obama in very large numbers. He has not delivered on any of those promises, he has not held one promise since he got into office. Which is par for the course when it comes to a politician, but luckily for us the Independents are not as understanding when a politician lies.

    I told my sister the other day and it bears repeating, When Bush came into office he was blamed for a recession that started the year before 90 days in. It became his recession in the media and the Democrats talking heads, 9/11 happened 8 months into his presidency and that was his fault too. So when do we start to hold Obama responsible for the problems that have occurred during his tenure as President? because surely the planning for 9/11 and the recession of 2001 all happened in years that a Democrat was President.

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