IT'S A QUEER FORMULA THE PUNDITOCRACY HAS COME UP WITH...:

Mr. Cool Gets Hot (John Heilemann, Jan 22, 2010, New York Magazine)

Barack Obama is not unfamiliar with delivering big-stakes, high-pressure, bet-the-farm speeches—but the challenges presented by Wednesday’s State of the Union are of a different kind and order of magnitude than he has ever confronted before. [...]

One of the greatest puzzles of 2009 is how this most gifted of communicators and his team of savvy message-meisters failed so utterly to provide a compelling explanatory framework for his ambitious policy agenda. Health care, of course, is Exhibit A in this indictment. For all the complaints in some quarters about the performance of Rahm Emanuel, the truth is that the White House chief of staff has played the inside game adroitly. What’s been missing has been equal skill at the outside game, in the form of an overarching argument at once coherent and compelling to the broad electorate—the kind of thing at which both Obama and his message guru, David Axelrod, once seemed to be geniuses.

...where they first make a bow to the oratorical/rhetorical brilliance of the UR and then worry about how incoherent a communicator he is. It's kind of the opposite of W, whose ineptness at speaking was universally acknowledged in piece after piece conceding how brilliant his latest speech had been.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 23, 2010 8:12 AM