Rhetoric and Speechification over Subtance

I’m getting ready to do the live blog tonight for the Obama jobs speech.   It seems the press is finally doing due diligence on the President. For some reason, media due diligence is only done after it’s way too late.  Right now, the press seems obsessed with following John Huntsman who has about a 1% following and just about that much of a chance of making it through a Republican primary.  But, now that we’re up against some of the craziest Republicans that could ever possibly come up the drain pipe, we’ve got the press suddenly saying speeches aren’t enough while the President still thinks all he has to do is give one and problems magically clear up.  Here’s a really good pre-speech analysis that should’ve been written around 2008. Bottom line:  Actions speak louder than words.

Barack Obama has been here before — politically endangered, doubts mounting about his leadership, and a growing sense that, for all his promise, he has lost his way.

As he has done before — whether to salvage a candidacy or revive a policy — Obama will resort to a device that has been successful for him in the past: the Big Speech.

With most of the country saying he has mismanaged the economy, President Obama will use an address to a joint session of Congress on Thursday to outline his plan to create jobs and head off a second recession. It will be the fifth time Obama has spoken to a joint session, the howitzer of the presidential communications arsenal.

But the risks this time are as high as the potential for any reward.

Obama faces some particular challenges on this outing, ones magnified by the summer’s debt-ceiling debate, when he spoke frequently to the American public but with little effect on the outcome.

Americans have been hearing a lot from him. For months, he has discussed some of the same jobs proposals he will detail in the speech, mentioning them as recently as this week at a Labor Day rally in Detroit.

With the unemployment rate locked in above 9 percent, voters are weary of words. Another high-profile speech is likely to underscore how little has changed since Obama said in his first joint-session address, a month after taking office, “Now is the time to jump-start job creation.”

Yes, all you have to do is say it and it comes true.  Now, I have to admit that President Obama doesn’t have the same problems that most of the Republicans do.  They are on the wrong side of history since just about every thing they are pushing these days got settled by and around the civil war which most of them appear to be ready to fight all over again.  They also have so many factual errors that you wonder why some of the journalists in those debates don’t mention it. Perry and Bachmann are stand outs on that front.  Perry has no idea what a Ponzi scheme is and Michelle Bachmann should look like Pinocchio by now.  Both of them appear to be blissfully unaware that the federal government has the ability to tax people and businesses and print money.  This makes so many of their economic points so moot that it’s not even funny.  However, I think they want to repeal all the amendments save the second, so maybe in that context it all makes sense.

However, it’s hard to put meaningless rhetoric vs misstatement of fact kind of rhetoric on any kind of scale and trying to find a balance.  They both are forms of lies.  One basically is saying things that never happened and the other is talking about things that will never happen.  I stuck Hillary’s famous campaign speech on celestial choirs up top for reference.  It’s a germane today as it was the day it was given.

All I can say is there are lies and there are damned lies.  If you don’t say what you mean and do what you say, you might as well be making facts up along the way too. The only difference that I can see is which verb tense you use.

Join us tonight for the live blog tonight when I try to look at the speech through my economist’s spectacles.  Right now, I’m just a super depressed American voter looking for a reasonable alternative before I have to vote none of the above and lose along with the rest of the country.