Obama speech recalls Reagan.

The patter of the Oval Office hasn't come as easily
to Obama as it has to his predecessors.
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.



Source: Http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0111/47595.html