Blog Post #2 - 'Get a Job Hippie' - The President's Jobs Speech

The president recently gave a speech to a joint session of congress on the subject of jobs in America. Ostensibly the purpose of the speech was to outline his sweeping new plan to encourage job creation, however, the most interesting aspect of the speech may have been its apparent duel purposes.

Generally speaking, when politicians are not kissing babies they are stealing their lollipops.

Obama is very good at hiding the strings sometimes. He naturally comes off as competent and compelling, though he is very practiced. He seems to have two of Aristotle's characteristics of a great speaker. As a speaker, he generally easily displays the qualities of phronesis (wisdom) and arete (virtue,) but his measured and sometimes stiff style often does not lend itself well to building a sense of goodwill (eunoia.) He is a gifted speaker though, and the speech was typical of his style.

Structurally, the speech was fairly simple. Its language was direct and plain. He did not attempt to make the message towering or poetic, and he used frequent repetition to attempt to drill a series of "bullet points" home to the viewers. (Invention) It seemed at the outset that his plan for the speech was to convince (or more accurately to simply state) that there was virtually no reason to disagree with the point he was making.

"You should pass this right away." he repeated over and over again. Everything about the speech seemed designed to cut to the quick, to promote a sense of urgency. So much of the speech was dedicated to the idea of unity. He seemed to be castigating his live audience for the benefit of his extended one. The subject of the speech seemed to be "before we can create jobs we have to do the one we were sent here to do" everything in the speech's construction seems to suggest the phrase "just get it done." In many ways he seemed to be channeling popular frustration at the apparent ineffectiveness of the system. (On this level I felt the speech was very effective.)

"Pass this bill" is repeated so many times that it actually becomes something of a distraction. The introduction outlines the need for action and the main concept of the speech (stasis point) seems to be that the jobs plan is the best option, and that it is a patchwork of ideas designed to appeal to as many disparate philosophies as possible. He continually reminded the congress that the ideas laid out in the plan where their ideas. His proof seemed to be a cobbled series of associations to earlier plans. He attempted at every opportunity to bridge the divide between right and left. The subtext of the speech seemed to be "if you can't come together on this, you can't come together at all" and the entire speech may have been designed with the knowledge that no consensus will be met.

He attempted to cut the legs out from under his dissenters from the first sentence. The general arrangement of the body of the speech was to state a cause and effect relationship (if you pass this bill then something that everyone agrees is good will happen). This simple cause-and-effect design is repeated throughout the speech. It is an attempt, I think, to make an horrendously complicated issue seem like something that can be fixed easily with a few direct steps.

The style and delivery of the speech suggest the real audience of the speech was actually the voting public. The answers are simple, the language assured and direct. His delivery is downright paternal, everything about the speech feels informative, even when the rhetoric is light on support or suggestions.

Returning to the canons of rhetoric for a moment, I was left at the end of the speech with many questions, a talking point or two and a confident smile on my face. It seems he had told me what I wanted to hear and what I had to do to fix the problem. He had also blithely (for him) suggested that should the plan does not work, it will be because the others in the room could not herd the necessary cats to get the job done. Beyond my own recollections of the speech, memory is the most confusing canon for me to understand.

His command of the material made him seem competent and allowed him to stare forcefully out into his audience. It provided him with a physical directness that matched his words. All in all the speech was effective, though it did seem more concerned with its hidden warning and sabre rattling than laying out an effective analysis of our economic problems.

I give it a 8/10.
Rob Meisner 9/13/11

P.S. As a former art history major (and complete nerd) the included image made me laugh.