No, really! So says The LA Times’ Meghan Daum
Apparently, a lot of people consider President Obama to be bumblingly inarticulate. “The guy can’t talk his way out of a paper bag!” a reader wrote to me recently. “Sarah Palin is a brilliant speaker. It’s the president whose sentences are undiagrammable,” said another in response to a column I wrote about Palin. It’s not just my readers, nor is it exclusively conservatives, who hold this view. A Google search of “does Obama have a speech impediment” turns up several pages of discussion among the president’s supporters and critics alike.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 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!).
See! It’s so easy. He’s so super-duper awesomely mega-brilliant that he can’t actualize an coherent sentence. Yeah, that’s it. That’s the ticket.
Now, compare and contrast “Obama’s stuttering is a sign of brilliance” with “Bush’s stuttering is a sign of how stupid he is.”
http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message542653/pg1
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364×2142342
Personally, I never cared if a person stuttered or not. I always thought that criticism of a stutterer was a sign of ignorance.
But when it comes to politics, stuttering is a case of “whose ox is getting gored.”
While I certainly share your lack of respect for Obama I have to point out that she does put forth a real possible explanation; she didn’t just make it up.
Of course the quality of a person’s teachers and information can make even a natural genius sound like an idiot; look at the stupidity Milton Friedman spouts when he talks about evolution as opposed to economics.
Quote:
The stammer is commonly found among university professors, characters in Woody Allen movies (and Obama according to the author)
So, university professors and NMP Obama are nothing more than shallowly-written and boring characters in a script written by an incestuous pedophile?
Yep, that pretty much explains Obama.
Never mind the stammer. Look at the results of the stammerer.
1) $14 trillion in deficits
2) Unguarded Southern border
3) Economy in shambles
4) Raiding the pension fund to avoid the debt ceiling
5) Foreign policy disasters
6) Three wars, one with a record death toll
7) Gas/food/clothing prices skyrocketing
8) Wiped out his own Democrat Party in November, losing 800+ seats
9) Record number of golf games for a President
10) Ignoring the fact that Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, welfare are totally broke.
11) Socializing lending institutions, the medical industry and the auto industry – all with terrible results
I’m sorry, what did you say?
I was too busy admiring his swing.
Guy, I have no idea what you are trying to say.