The Limits of Charisma

.....Mr. President, please stay off TV.

"Doing Letterman again won't help. It may boost the host's ratings, Mr. President, but probably not your own."

Howard Fineman
Published Sep 26, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Oct 5, 2009

"Members of Obama's own party know who Obama is not; they still sometimes wonder who he really is."

If ubiquity were the measure of a presidency, Barack Obama would already be grinning at us from Mount Rushmore. But of course it is not. Despite his many words and television appearances, our elegant and eloquent president remains more an emblem of change than an agent of it. He's a man with an endless, worthy to-do list—health care, climate change, bank reform, global capital regulation, AfPak, the Middle East, you name it—but, as yet, no boxes checked "done." This is a problem that style will not fix. Unless Obama learns to rely less on charm, rhetoric, and good intentions and more on picking his spots and winning in political combat, he's not going to be reelected, let alone enshrined in South Dakota.

The president's problem isn't that he's too visible; it's the lack of content in what he says when he keeps showing up on the tube. Obama can seem a mite too impressed with his own aura, as if his presence on the stage is the Answer. There is, at times, a self-referential (even self-reverential) tone in his big speeches. They are heavily salted with the words "I" and "my." (He used the former 11 times in the first few paragraphs of his address to the U.N. last week.) Obama is a historic figure, but that is the beginning, not the end, of the story.

(I wonder: If our President does not have the ability to be "Commander in Chief", how much help will there be for our VETERANS.......)

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http://www.newsweek.com/id/216210?GT1=43002