The Master Orator and the Amateur
By pm317 on September 13, 2009 at 5:01 PM in Current Affairs
The one and only. No teleprompters, no nothing but just plain old intellect talking — President Clinton paying tribute to Walter Cronkite at a memorial service held on Wednesday.
President Clinton’s health care reform speech to the Congress from 1993 and more below the fold.
In his speech at the memorial service, I like to think President Clinton was channeling subliminal messages about the present day TV journalism run amuck or the abysmal lack of intellectual honesty in the Big Media. But I think he is too much of a statesman and cared too much for Cronkite to take any digs at the media scoundrels assembled there.
Clinton is a master craftsman when it comes to choosing words and delivering them with a punch. And I smirked when he reminded Obama the significance of his upcoming health care reform speech on Wednesday night.
How do you think that speech went? Obama sounded angry and he got called out on his lies, at least one of them, loudly and clearly.
Here is Bill Clinton’s speech to the Congress in 1993 where health care reform figured prominently. Transcript here.
A standing ovation for Hillary when a beaming Bill introduced her to those gathered. From what we have learned so far in the health care reform debate, it is one contentious issue with too many power players who are at odds with one another. Hillary was not the impediment as Obama made it out to be during the primary campaign to getting health care reform legislation in 1993-94, she was not divisive, and she did not fail. Obama, more popular than Hillary and the walk on water guy with a super majority in Congress is now flailing (and failing) to get any reasonable (from the progressives point of view) legislation.
I feel Hillary would have done better now — she had nearly 15 years to think over how she would approach it differently. She professed universal health care, not as a campaign rhetoric but with a plan during the primary and the so called progressives rejected her for the shiny penny. They were all promised a pony but will be lucky if they get a donkey, that is, as in a Democratic donkey. Not going to happen with Obama having already made backdoor deals with the insurance and the pharmaceutical industry and who knows whom else. I think it is cute though about how he bashes in his rallies all the people he has made deals with, food for the gullible, and gullible they are. The progressives won’t get a public option, they may not even get a useless trigger for public option from the amateur they voted for. They are getting screwed royally. From TPM:
Remember back on Friday, President Obama discussed the public option on a conference call with House liberals? And remember how the upshot of that call was that Obama planned to meet yesterday with the chairs of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Congressional Black Caucus, Congressional Hispanic Caucus, And Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus?
Well that meeting never happened. Yesterday, sources told me that the meeting hadn’t been scheduled, but could happen as late as this morning. Today, a House aide tells me that it’s not going to happen at all.
And what is the amateur doing to sell his (non-existent) profound ideas, policies, and position papers that actually implement true reform? As of Saturday, he was reverting to the only thing he knows best, campaigning: screaming in the most absurd fashion his campaign chant “fired up and ready to go,” in his health care rally in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He sounded more like a peddler at a carnival selling his cheap wares. It certainly did not sound presidential. He did the same in Ohio at the AFL-CIO labor day picnic (see video below). As one blog commenter said, he is now into running reruns.
, the basis for the Best Motion Picture Nominee (Golden Globes) starring Brad Pitt.
, the novel by John Le Carre, a new motion picture starring Gary Oldman and Colin Firth.
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