❊ My Impression Of Obama’s Speech

Let me first get this out of the way: I enjoy listening to President Obama’s speeches. I find his voice soothing and I rarely feel that the man is taking down to me. I also always find his ideas well developed and well communicated. This is why I stayed in my car listening to the radio until the speech was over (transcript of the speech).

That said, I couldn’t help feeling that there wasn’t anything groundbreaking in the speech. It just felt like a new packaging of already existing American policies, bundled more tightly into what appears like a coherent whole. To the geeks out there, it’s as if his speech was a defrag of a messy hard drive. The end result is neater and more efficient, but the content is still the same.

For instance there is no obvious over-arching theme, unless you count pragmatism as one. He talked of a principled endorsement of the freedom of peoples wherever they are, but there was no mention of Saudi Arabia and he treated Bahrain with kids gloves. The confusing policy on Syria is still there (“Lead the change or get out of the way” sounds like a fudge of two opposing viewpoints). The stink of hedging was all over the place..

He appeared oblivious of the strong mood of optimism among the Palestinians and Arabs who had very high hopes of a Palestinian spring from what they saw at the Nakba day. The peace process part of his speech was painful just because it grounded things back to the nuts and bolts of land-swaps and territory calculus.

But maybe I shouldn’t be so harsh on President Obama. After all, he is walking on a very tight rope and politics is the art of the possible. Nobody had any high expectations of the speech today and perhaps his biggest achievement was that he didn’t do any harm..

What did you think of the speech?