Max Atkinson praises President Obama’s ‘masterful mood changes’ exemplified in part by his Osama Bin Laden televised address last night. You can see and read it at https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/05/02/osama-bin-laden-dead
Yet it’s much too long, with (as usual) too much Obama praising Obama, plus some of it is, ahem, just ghastly:
"It was nearly 10 years ago that a bright September day was darkened by the worst attack on the American people in our history. The images of 9/11 are seared into our national memory – hijacked planes cutting through a cloudless September sky; the Twin Towers collapsing to the ground; black smoke billowing up from the Pentagon; the wreckage of Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where the actions of heroic citizens saved even more heartbreak and destruction.
A fact not lost on Washington Post film critic Stephen Hunter, who must be taken to know a few things about clunky dialogue:
Any joy one might feel in the intelligence of our analysts and the bravery of our door kickers was significantly diminished by Obama’s malignant narcissism. The first part of the announcement, evoking 9/11, was vulgarly overwritten as per Obama’s view of himself as some kind of gifted orator. The adjective bloated compote was unworthy of the subject, banal and self-indulgent…
I was, I confess, a little stunned by the first part of the President’s speech. It was, as Mr Hunter says, overwritten. It managed to be both overwrought and generic – all that telepromptered overload about cloudless Tuesday mornings was not only tackily over-prettified but came over as unfelt and hand-me-down, like a course exercise in some third-rate creative-writing school’s Soaring Oratory class.
Hunter gets the better of this one. But does it matter?
Not really. Any bloated rhetorical shortcomings will have been lost in the torrent of patriotic American self-satisfaction which the President’s announcement of Osama’s killing has prompted.
For an especially vivid example of US rhetoric on this occasion powerfully capturing the local mood, have a look at this.
Moral of the story?
If you have good material which really people want to hear, most people will say you made a great speech.
Even if you, er, didn’t.
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