re: #513 buzzsawmonkey

Obama has a nice, resonant voice—James Earl Jones Lite, if you will. When he is given a script to read, the voice sounds good.

In that, he was/is a marked contrast with both his predecessor and his opponent; neither Bush nor McCain have resonant voices, neither had any particular oratorical skills. Bush had a thin voice, with enough of a Southern accent to count against him in the North and among those people in the South who have been trained by the Northern elites to look upon a Southern accent as an indicator of being a hick. McCain’s voice, too, was fairly thin, and a little wheezy. Thus, Obama’s round tones, projected confidently, were able to pass muster as “great oratory,” particularly since he had co-opted so many neo-Reaganite optimistic phrases to camouflage his few intimations of what his program really was.

However, if you listen to Obama speak, you realize that he barks out subclauses of a teleprompter length, pauses until the next phrase replaces it on the cue machine, then barks that out, pauses—and repeats, and repeats. But he does not appear to actually know what he is saying; on those occasions where the prompter screws up, he rapidly becomes lost and fumbling, to the point where he gives the impression of not having read the speech in advance at all, and having no idea whatever of the speech’s subject matter, organization, or the underlying ideas and their progression.

He is, in other words, not an orator, but a megaphone. One is tempted to say “mega-phony,” since the words and thoughts he renders clearly are not his; were they even initially his own, cleaned up and honed by speechwriters, he would show more acquaintance with the subject matter than he does.

But these failures do not impress most of his listeners. They want to believe; they like the sound of his voice, and if they listen at all to what he is actually saying, it is only to the optimistic phrases and the promises, not the substance of what is being said.

i don’t like his voice at all. the emphasis on all the wrong words in the sentence
is so odd and off putting. he drones. he doesn’t speak. and the arrogant manner in which he issues command like single phrases is very annoying.
i don’t like the condescending tone he uses. i especially can’t stand the attempt
to use different accents based on who he is pandering to. he is bad at accents.
it is embarrassing to watch and listen to this attempt to endear himself to
to whoever he is trying to use.
and now to the content of his speeches?
can’t take the leftist commie b.s. at all.
i can’t wait for more ‘promter sabotage.
i bet o will soon be like a hog on thin ice wondering when he is going to plunge into a bad situation. the odds are the prompter will malfunction even if
by accident.
he screamed at it yesterday, “move up move up”
pathetic, he is lost w/out other people’s words.