TW: Peggy Noonan is a drama queen but she loves a good speech. She liked the Obama speech last week more importantly she frames why Obama remains popular amidst concurrent crises and rabid opposition from a rabid segment of the Republican party. Noonan is a partisan Republican but not venomous force like Limbaugh whose vitriolic address to CPAC begs comment but I refuse to go there.
From Peggy Noonan at WSJ:
"A mysterious thing happened in that speech Tuesday night. By the end of it Barack Obama had become president. Every president has a moment when suddenly he becomes what he meant to be, or knows what he is...
...So with Mr. Obama, about four-fifths of the way through the speech. He was looking from the prompters to the congressmen and senators, and suddenly he was engaging on what seemed a deeper level. His voice took on inflection. He wasn't detached, as if he was wondering how he was doing. He seemed equal to the moment and then, in some new way, in command of it. It happened around here
...Mr. Obama had to communicate, and it's something forgotten or overlooked by political sophisticates, is this: Someone's in the kitchen. Someone's cooking. In a time of crisis, someone's in charge. That's what he had to demonstrate Tuesday night. And he did. This will do him good.
At a White House backgrounder the day of the address, an Obama aide said the speech was deliberately meant not to be Clintonian—it would not consist of 167 initiatives cobbled together. The president has been reading FDR and his fireside chats. Mr. Obama's advisers believed they'd reached the right balance between candor about the crisis and optimism about our ability to meet it...
...Internal polling shows people are angry not only at bankers and CEOs, who were casually destructive of the economy and now have the gall to ask for money, but neighbors who were imprudent and got mortgages they couldn't afford. The budget deficit is important structurally but can't be a focus now, jolting the system is, stabilizing the situation is. As for the stimulus package, if they'd followed opinion polls, it would have been bigger, not smaller. Republicans made gains by opposing the stimulus, but only among their base. Independent and unaligned voters have been marginally more supportive of Mr. Obama since the stimulus battle and do not see the lack of GOP votes as a rebuke to the president.
...I think the president, politically, has three big things going for him as he faces this crisis.
First, legitimacy. Our last two presidents were haunted by the circumstances of their election, and significant swathes of the country never fully accepted them. George W. Bush had the cloud of the 2000 recount, and his loss that year of the popular vote; Bill Clinton won in 1992 with only 43% , in a three-man race in which the other two were, essentially, Republican. But no one doubts Mr. Obama's legitimacy. He won by seven points, with 53%. He's the first president without the illegitimacy cloud since Bush I.
Second, we're in the middle of an emergency. In times like this, Americans want their president to succeed. Politically the crisis works for Mr. Obama.
Third is an unspoken public sense that we cannot afford another failed presidency, that we just got through one and a second would be terrible. Americans know how much good a successful presidency does for us in the world, in the public mind. The last unalloyed, inarguable success was Reagan. We need another. Liberal? Conservative? That, to the great middle of America, would, at the moment, be secondary. They want successful. They want "That worked." They want the foreign visitor to say, "I like your president." They want to respond, "So do I."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123568516377286823.html
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