The teleprompter President. Even the Brits can see the clothes have no emperor

Tongue-tied Barack Obama is turning into Jimmy Carter

Barack Obama's gaffe mocking the disabled by comparing his (inept but improving) 10 pin bowling skills to the "special Olympics" illustrates the problem he now has in communicating with the American people.
Obama seems incapable of balancing the need to be a national leader and his childish desire to retain his image as the uber cool dude he so clearly believes that he is.
The fact that he felt the need to go on Jay Leno at all to sell his stimulus plan, budget and banking bailouts shows that he has communications issues. The public are not buying his spending splurge, or his administration's confused attempt to kill off executive bonuses.
Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei at Politico wrote a characteristically insightful piece on Thursday that began: "Of all the pitfalls Barack Obama might face in the presidency, here is one not many people predicted: He is struggling as a public communicator."
Allen is the hardest working and one of the very best reporters in Washington. Vandehei has established a reputation, with his fellow executive John Harris, of writing pieces that successfully synthesise and lead conventional wisdom inside the beltway. When they speak, you should listen.They point out:
The discipline and strategic focus of the campaign have yet to move into the White House. The story of the day often catches the president flat-footed or on the defensive - and regularly undercut by fellow Democrats.
To Obama's dismay, he is learning that successful presidential communications is only in part - often a fairly small part - about personal eloquence. It requires harnessing his words to a consistent strategy of public education. Obama needs lawmakers and voters alike to view the world through his prism, and to accept his analysis of what's wrong and his priorities about how to make it right.
They condemn Obama's "mixed messages" on the economy, alternating gloom and hope, and what to me is the most damaging fact that he is "too cool for his own good":
Even when Obama went before the cameras to express outrage at the AIG bonuses, he seemed to nod to the contrived nature of it. During an East Room event, when Obama coughed, he drew laughter by departing from the teleprompter to crack: "Excuse me, I'm choked up with anger here."
Obama has never run anything other than his presidential campaign. He doesn't know the difference between governing and campaigning and he's sticking with what he knows.
You can afford to duck and dive between great hopes, dark fears and confected anger when you get three news cycles a day during a campaign. But presidencies last four years and their legacies for centuries. It's not about winning every news cycle. You have to set a mood. Obama has been curiously slow to learn this.
Allen and Vandehei are not the only ones who have noticed that Obama appears out of his depth. Michael Wolff, America's premier writer on the media, a bit of a liberal, has just written a devastating critique of Obama's speaking skills, comparing him to Jimmy Carter and branding him a "terrible bore".
Here are some of Wolff's highlights:
Sheesh, the guy is Jimmy Carter.
That homespun bowling crap on Jay Leno, followed by the turgid, teachy fiscal policy lecture, together with the hurt defensiveness (and bad script for it) that everybody in Washington "is Simon Cowell... Everybody's got an opinion," is pure I'm-in-over-my-head stuff.
We're face-to-face with the reality, the man can't talk worth a damn.
This guy is leaden and this show is in trouble.
Wolff stresses that it is the president's sanctimonious self-regard that has shaped his inept message management.
Having been so successfully elected, he's acting like people actually want to hear what he thinks. He's the great earnest bore at the dinner party. Instead of singing for his supper, he's just talking-and going on at length. The real job of making people part of the story you're telling, of having them hang on your every word, of getting the tone and detail right, the hard job of holding a conversation, he ain't doing.
He's cold; he's prickly; he's uncomfortable; he's not funny; and he's getting awfully tedious.
He thinks it's all about him. That we want him for himself-that he doesn't have to seduce, charm, surprise, show some skin.
To some degree we have always known that Obama, while a great platform speaker, is not a great talker. He was a dreadful debater and more prone to be "on it" in one stump speech and utterly uninterested in another just hours later than any front line politician I have seen. But he was undeniably able to extemporise to good effect during the campaign.
That said he was always happiest with an autocue and Republicans are rightly now having a lot of fun pointing out his security blanket like reliance on the plastic screens for even basic announcements.
But since he became president, the old magic has been missing. Michael Wolff is right to say that it was wrong for Obama's fawning admirers to proclaim his inaugural speech a triumph when to me and most others who followed him during the campaign it was a flat, featureless disappointment with not one single memorable line--and this from the man who thinks he's Abraham Lincoln redux.
The most striking aspect of the Leno appearance is that while he's all smiles and self-regard, Obama is flat out not funny.
I thought Obama's speech at the Al Smith dinner last year was a triumph, his line about getting his middle name Hussain from someone who never thought he would run for president, one of the comedic highlights of the whole campaign.
But he had help from speechwriters there. Since then, while appearing amused by himself and his wisecracks, Obama has been spectacularly unfunny. The man himself might have a sense of humour- and it's clear that he has a wry eye for the absurdities of being leader of the free world (witness his riffs with Leno about the constraints imposed by the Secret Service), but the president himself is not quick witted. He mocks the oddness of being the most powerful man in the world, he never mocks himself.
Check out this piece on his attempts at humour and hear what Malcolm Kushner, co-creator of the humour exhibit at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, says: ""He doesn't use, like, real jokes. You can see he has a sense of humour, and it's there. But I'm waiting for the stuff I can quote and use." Quite.
Comedic skills are not a requirement in a leader. As the piece points out Bill Clinton lacked the detachment required to self-deprecate with humour. Margaret Thatcher famously had never heard of Monty Python when she delivered her denunciation of the Liberal Democrat dove as a dead parrot, her greatest conference quip.
But what both of those leaders had was an almost mythical ability to connect with the public, a gift shared by Tony Blair. Clinton and Blair in particular had advanced emotional intelligence, they felt peoples' pain.
When Barack Obama says he is angry about the bonuses issues to the failing insurance giant AIG, he gives the impression that there is no boiling rage, merely mild irritation. More, that the irritation comes from the fact that his presidency has been disrupted by these piffling concerns.
As Wolff puts it: "The guy just doesn't know what to say. He can't connect. Emotions are here, he's over there. He can't get the words to match the situation."
Obama seems more interested in maintaining his cool demeanour than showing his country that he cares. Bizarre.
Fine, you say, "He is cool and calm and collected, that's what we want in a president. He's a clever chap, a bit professorial perhaps, but he is very good at responding to new events and using these ‘teaching moments' to educate the American people. Look at what he did with his speech on race last year."
But this is just the point, Obama's skills from the moment he stepped on the national stage have been strategic and reactive. He's fine when he's laying out some great policy he has spent months working up and he can be effective in responding to crises.
But he is absolutely hopeless at spotting where these crises come from, useless at predicting them and when they do pop along, like the AIG bonus issue, he is far, far too slow to act.
As Michael Wolff says: "The true secret of the power of language is in quickness. Barack Obama can't keep up. He evidently needs too much preparation."
Yes, Obama made a good fist of his speech addressing the issues thrown up by the race row over Rev Jeremiah Wright, but only after months of procrastination. Don't forget he used his speech on race to defend Wright. It was only when the nutty preacher kept banging on about how America was spreading the Aids virus that Obama threw him under the bus. And even then he waited about three days to act.
Obama is flat footed. His detachment means he seems unable to feel the anger of mainstream Americans. Obama and his people seemed utterly bemused as well when he condemned Pennsylvanians as bitter about the plunging economy and reliant on God and guns. Again, it took ages for him to acknowledge that his patronising analysis was insulting to voters.
Now we've got the economic meltdown. Another opportunity for the "teaching moment" but Obama has failed to seize the moment. He has not made a major speech or a fireside chat with the nation to explain in layman's terms what is going on in the financial system. His efforts on Jay Leno were dull and laboured.
He speaks like the kind of lecturer who puts their students to sleep. His first prime time press conference (there is another coming this week) was colossally dull, with rambling ten minute answers.
Still don't believe that Obama is the new Carter? Michael Wolff writes: "It's instructive and humorous to remember that Carter ran a brilliant campaign that succeeded largely because his voice was new. Simple, direct, basic, human. And then, of course, he turned into a sad-sack twit."
Sound familiar? That sums up Obama rather well right now.
His political career has been an essay in learning from mistakes and recovering. He is clearly intelligent and determined. He can be savvy. He might be irritating me with his every turgid, unfunny, hectoring pronouncement, but the American people still like him. I think it most likely that he will win two terms.
But it is a telling indictment of his first 11 weeks in office that the comparison with Jimmy Carter, a one term liberal reformer who was ultimately not up to the job, is no longer an absurdity.
Obama needs to loosen up, lose the smug self-regard, get angry and, at all costs, stay away from killer rabbits.