"There is nothing in the world like a persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus and upset the convictions and debauch the emotions of an audience not practiced in the tricks and delusions of oratory." Mark Twain
President Obama's healthcare address to Congress displayed the oratorical gift he once revealed to Harry Reid. But the gift has stopped giving. In last night's speech before a joint session of Congress, the President pulled all the stops on his vocal organ, played his strong suit, and deployed the "gift."
But the gift has stopped giving, because people have started listening.
He accused opponents of using "scare tactics." This came after he'd piled scare tactic upon scare tactic himself to illustrate the problem. The healthcare system is "at the breaking point." It offers "insecurity today." People are dying! Thirty million can't get coverage, he said. Wait, we been told for years that it's 47 million. What happened to the other seventeen?
He wants a plan that "builds on what works and fixes what doesn't." The only problem is that doesn't jive with the thousand-plus pages of H.R. 3200 that have been read by too many Americans.
His description of limited reform doesn't match the bill.
It was the perfect moment for non-partisan conciliatory language, but Obama pulled out brass knuckles instead, attacking "bogus claims" made by opponents to the plan.
What plan still wasn't clear? H.R. 3200? Or, his intentions for a healthcare plan he was revealing, or claimed to be revealing, in the speech? He seemed not to want to differentiate between the two, but yet to differentiate between the two. Conflicted, for sure, and intentionally, also for sure. A shell game of hide the plan. Criticize H.R. 3200 and you're not being fair because that's not what he wants to have happen.
When he said, "While there remain some significant details to be ironed out," we heard something unique in recent joint Congressional speech history. Derisive laughter... [snip]
Then came that surreal moment when he said that spending cuts in a healthcare program -- one that the government already badly manages -- would cover additional costs to a even wider system. And, if the promised savings don't materialize, there'll be compensating cuts. [?, like rationing?]
About the time we were swimming in a sea of uncorroborated vagaries and smothering beneath layered non sequitur claims, he rolled out the memory of Ted Kennedy and the camera panned in on the widow. Out came the "moral issue" that the late Senator Kennedy said reflects the "character of our country."
A character lesson.
From Ted.
It transitioned to the recollection of how government once-upon-a-time assumed the responsibility for the Social Security of the elderly. Too bad no one stood and said, "Social Security is bankrupt!"
So, it was lofty oratory built on unsubstantiated claims; emotionally sustained by anecdotal tugs on the heart strings; punctuated with vague statistics; culminating in the remembrance of a liberal icon; that led to the invocation of that paradigm of welfare programs that's gone completely haywire.
"The nature of oratory is such that there has always been a tendency among politicians and clergymen to oversimplify complex matters. From a pulpit or a platform even the most conscientious of speakers finds it very difficult to tell the whole truth." Aldous Huxley
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