> If your comment was aimed at a newscaster or Oprah I would agree with you. > But one of the jobs of the President of the United States is to articulate > the emotions of the nation. Reagen did it with the Challenger, Clinton with > OKC, Bush with 9-11.
Aha! I see a couple of major differences between Sunday's address and the earlier ones you mention: First, because of the nature of the operation in Abbottabad, Obama had actual information (breaking news, as it were) to pass along. All we'd heard was the headline. In the other cases, the President wasn't letting us know what had happened. Also, in those earlier addresses, the primary emotion that the President was articulating was grief. The general response Sunday was celebratory, which is trickier to express - I'm glad that Obama didn't come across as gloating. > I detested Reagen and Bush as presidents, and did not > like having them be the guy who spoke for me, but I had to accept that often > that was there job (though obviously not all of the 300 million or so of us > will agree with the President when he tries to do this). It's fair to say that for the most part, when a president is expressing condolences, he speaks for (almost) all of the American people > When I said I liked Obama's speech, one of the things I meant was that he > did pretty much capture my emotions at the moment. I think it is valid for > other Americans to criticize the speech if they feel that it did not capture > their emotions. I don't think it is valid to criticize the speech for > attempting to do that - I think that is what any president in that situation > would try to do, and should try to do. Beyond the immediate and obvious "good" when I first heard the headline, I didn't have much in the way of emotions to capture when the President spoke, and, as I think I've made clear, I was looking for the information to form my own emotional response. There's a fine line between capturing/expressing the audience's emotions and trying to spin the situation to get a desired emotional response. -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en
