From 333's favorite source so he must agree with this...
Two weeks after President Barack Obama returned from a Hawaiian vacation spent reading a 900-page biography of Ronald Reagan, he delivered a speech in Tucson, Ariz., Wednesday that incorporated, but didn’t parrot, the gilded, common-touch oratory of the 40th president.
The pageantry and patter of the Oval Office that came so naturally to Reagan and Bill Clinton haven’t come quite as easily to Obama, an electrifying campaign performer who is finally mastering the intimate, idiosyncratic language of the American presidency.
It’s not as if Obama hasn’t managed to connect emotionally with the American people since being elected — he delivered an especially moving eulogy last April at the funeral of 29 coal miners in West Virginia and nearly choked up when discussing his mother’s losing battle with cancer and insurance companies after he passed health care reform last spring.
But he’s never managed to do it consistently since becoming president.
And he had certainly never delivered a speech quite like the one he made to honor Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and the six people murdered in Arizona on Wednesday: a passionate and pared-down delivery that grounded his usual soaring rhetoric with expressions of straightforward patriotism, neighborly decency and raw grief.“It was different than Clinton at Oklahoma City or Reagan after the Challenger crash, but it was equally important for his presidency,” said presidential historian Douglas Brinkley, who has written books on Reagan as well as Presidents Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford and both Roosevelts.“Remember, he took some shots when he first took office, and that has bred caution in his speechwriting,” added Brinkley. “The Oval Office speech on the BP spill was boilerplate. Even the Fort Hood eulogy, while heartfelt, was pretty unmemorable. But this was a great presidential speech. This was a serious, transformational moment in his presidency.”
The president will probably never be as comfortable expressing emotions publicly as Clinton is. And the coolly cerebral Obama can’t replicate the folksy, anecdotal style native to Reagan, who was so uninterested in the basic details of governance that aides learned to grab his attention by telling stories, referencing movies and using colorful visual aids. Nor does Obama possess Reagan’s Hollywood-bred acting skills or comfort before the cameras.
But Obama is internalizing a lesson that came as second nature to his two predecessors: A president who can’t make a consistent emotional connection with the people he leads is a president who can’t govern effectively.
“Obama was especially well-suited to give this particular speech,” said Jonathan Prince, who co-wrote Clinton’s much-praised speech after the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
“He’s said some things in the heat of the moment, but he’s never given into the rhetoric of hatred,” Prince said of Obama. “This is a person who has always talked about common ground. It’s not like he had to invent that message. It came naturally.”
Obama’s aides bristle at the notion that Wednesday’s speech in Tucson represented a change in the president’s basic communications approach, arguing that he was simply responding to the powerful emotions of the moment and the need to transcend the politics of division.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0111/47595.html#ixzz1B2LInTxe
