Why Is the 'Master Communicator' Ducking the Media?

It’s a notion commonly peddled by both Democrats and the MSM that President Obama is a “master communicator.” This notion is repeated by liberal television pundit and scribe ad nauseam apparently in the belief that endless repetition can turn Wish into Truth.

Yet empirical evidence and closer scrutiny suggest that Mr. Obama is actually less Great Communicator than Serial Monologist, in the vein of Jerry Seinfeld, the late George Carlin (sans profanity), or even (brace yourself) Glenn Beck. And frankly, all three of them talk rings around him.

For those who doubt my doubt of the President’s rhetorical prowess, consider the following. The April 13 press conference–a short one consisting of only 8 questions, all quite understandably on the nuclear security issue–was the first solo presser since July 22, 2009.

That’s a 265-day desert without presidential communication. Or 51 days longer (20%) than George W. Bush’s 214-day stretch (April 4-Nov. 4) of logophobia back in 2004. Bush emerged from his silence two days after the Nov. 2 presidential election, suggesting his self-imposed gag order was mainly a bit of “strategery”–an incumbent with the lead, playing ball-control so as not to make a fatal gaffe in the final quarter.

Which begs two questions. First, why is the President ducking the press conference Q&A arena? And second, what makes a “Great Communicator” great?

Let’s start with the easy one. Why is the President avoiding press conferences? Well, if you recall, the most recent presser prior to last Tuesday’s was the July 22, 2009 press conference in the East Room of the White House. That one ended with this two-part question posed by Chicago Sun-Times Washington Bureau Chief Lynn Sweet: “Mr. President, recently, Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was arrested at his home in Cambridge. What does that incident say to you? And what does it say about race relations in America?”

This prompted Obama’s catastrophically presumptuous comment that the Cambridge police “acted stupidly,” a remark that ignited a week-long firestorm that only an absurdly-staged Beer Summit could extinguish. Who wouldn’t acquire an acute case of selective aphasia after that episode?

But this unfortunate incident also helps answer the second question. What makes a so-called Great Communicator great? And is Obama really a great communicator?

Let’s turn to two arguably great communicators of the 19th century, one American, one Russian. In a well-known eight-line poem beginning “I fear a Man of frugal Speech” and ending “I fear that He is Grand,” Emily Dickinson–herself no stranger to verbal parsimony–identified the primary trait of a Great Communicator: succinctness. Before Russian playwright Anton Chekhov ever started writing his famous plays, he wrote very popular short stories, some of them only three or four pages long. Half-a-world away, Chekhov echoed Dickinson’s advice in his oft-quoted maxim from an 1889 letter: “Brevity is the sister of talent.”

During the same 265-day time period when he studiously avoided press conferences, Obama delivered dozens of prepared speeches to friendly audiences, most to pitch his pet project, “Health Care Reform.” Obama also granted dozens of interviews, the overwhelming majority of them, not surprisingly, to MSM interviewers sympathetic to his policies. In these interviews and prepared speeches, the President is often positively logorrheic. Witness Obama’s rambling, desultory, 17-minute (!) non-answer answer to this simple direct question asked by an attendee at the April 2 Health Care forum: “Is it a wise decision to add more taxes to us with the health care? We are overtaxed as it is.” He could have just said: “Yes.”

But no:

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Incredibly–and paradoxically–out of all those hundreds of prepared remarks and serpentine professorial monologues, one is hard-pressed to come up with even one memorable phrase, one catchy sound bite, one “Ask not what your country can do for you” Bartlett moment in the vast Obama concordance. If brevity really is the sister of talent, then loquacity is its doddering grandfather.

Even George W. Bush, the relentlessly-maligned Mangler-in-Chief of the English language, had a Great Communicator’s innate instinct for pithiness. His classic “I’m the decider” comment (made during his defense of Donald Rumsfeld in April 2006) may strike some as comical, but at least it was clear and concise. Apparently succinctness is the one thing Obama can’t claim he inherited from his predecessor.

In my hometown, Chicago, we’ve had at least three great communicators in the last twenty years. Mayor Daley, Mike Royko, and Mike Ditka. And they’ve all had one thing in common: quotability. Under “Iron Mike” Ditka’s colorful leadership, the most exciting action of the Bears football games took place not on the field, but in those wonderful, pugilistic press conferences right afterwards. You see, great communicators don’t shy away from the press. They can’t keep away from them. They take them on with Ditka-esque pithiness, as when “Da Coach” famously remarked to a journalist who dared question his passion for the game: “You’re the same guy who wrote about me when I did have the fire, how it was the wrong thing to do. So who you crappin’?”

Whenever the mainstream media waxes poetic about the President’s rhetorical skills, I want to believe them. I really do. But all that comes into my head is that Mike Ditka rhetorical question.