Sunday, November 29, 2009
His test will come Tuesday when he attempts to drum up support for escalating an increasingly unpopular war.
By STEVEN THOMMA
McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — He’s soared to great heights, moving people with words that put him in a rarified league with such great communicators as Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan.
He’s also stumbled, however, turning in weak performances that make him appear to be another ordinary politician, unable to explain his policies in ways that rally people behind them.
This week, President Barack Obama will ask the American people to support his new strategy in Afghanistan, raising the question of whether he can sell the country an escalation of an expensive and increasingly unpopular war that it doesn’t want.
“I feel very confident that when the American people hear a clear rationale for what we’re doing there and how we intend to achieve our goals that they will be supportive,” he said. It will be a critical test of his skills as a communicator, a must-have tool of leadership that will help determine the fa te of his presidency. It’s a test he hasn’t always passed.
Obama aspires to greatness, to be a transformational figure who changes the nation’s course. He isn’t yet, however, in the top rank of American leaders, and he’s yet to show that he can move the country his way by matching the promise of his campaign rhetoric to the thorny challenges of his ambitious agenda. In fact, he’s lost ground, as his approval ratings and support for key policies such as a health care overhaul have dropped.
There’s no doubt that Obama is a skilled and sometimes exceptional orator.
His uplifting vision of a united country in his speech to the 2004 Democratic National Convention launched him into national politics. A stirring late-night speech to Iowa Democrats in November 2007 helped propel him past Hillary Clinton and on his way to the Democratic presidential nomination. His cool, reasoned talk on race in March 2008 helped stop the political bleeding he suffered after revelations of his pastor’s racially inflammatory sermons.
“He’s an extraordinarily gifted communicator,” said Michael Kehs, the general manager for the public relations giant Hill & Knowlton.
Obama’s delivery sometimes strikes observers as too much thinking and not enough feeling, too much dreaming and not enough striving.
After the shootings this month at Fort Hood, Texas, for example, his first public comments started awkwardly with a “shout out” to someone in the audience. He went on to express sympathy for those who’d been killed and wounded, but no sense of anger or outrage at the gunman.