{"id":33928,"date":"2009-11-11T01:01:01","date_gmt":"2011-05-19T01:45:02","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2011-05-19T01:45:02","modified_gmt":"2011-05-19T01:45:02","slug":"obama_the_iceman_plummets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/admin.rushlimbaugh.com\/daily\/2009\/11\/11\/obama_the_iceman_plummets\/","title":{"rendered":"Obama: The Iceman Plummets"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Maybe we need to call President Obama The Ice Man. He has no emotion, he doesn\u2019t show any emotion. Look how he reacts to unemployment. He\u2019s utterly unaffected! It\u2019s like it doesn\u2019t bother him at all. I want to share with you some excerpts of this piece by Toby Harnden in the UK Telegraph. ‘Barack Obama\u2019s reaction to bad news is to play it so cool that Americans yearn for a bit more drama — and some even for his predecessor, writes Toby Harnden in Washington. <\/p>\n

‘During the election campaign, Barack Obama\u2019s cool detachment was a winning quality, the ‘No Drama Obama\u2019 a welcome contrast with the ‘Mr. Angry\u2019 John McCain, never mind the hot-headed ‘I\u2019m the Decider\u2019 President George W Bush,\u2019 which, by the way, is a characterization I never understood. I never understood Bush being thought of as a hothead. Bush said, ‘You\u2019re either with us or against us.\u2019 That\u2019s no different than Reagan saying, ‘We win, they lose.\u2019 You know, Bush was just direct. Bush violated political correctness, at times. That\u2019s, I guess, what people consider to be hotheaded. We wanted hotheaded, by the way, after 9\/11! We wanted hotheadedness. That\u2019s the whole point of Toby\u2019s piece here. <\/p>\n

‘A year into his presidency, however, Mr. Obama seems a curiously bloodless president. If he experiences passion, he seldom shows it. It is often anyone\u2019s guess as to whether an event or issue truly moves him.\u2019 No passion. Perfect word for Obama: The Ice Man. ‘He has spent more than two months considering a troop increase but do we know how he really feels about the Afghan war?\u2019 Yeah, we do. He doesn\u2019t like victory. He\u2019s ‘not comfortable,\u2019 Toby, with the concept of victory. Yeah, we know how he feels about it. ‘In a sign that the Obama honeymoon truly is over, I began to hear this week the first stirrings of a wistfulness about Mr. Bush. ‘I never thought I\u2019d hear myself say it,\u2019 one Democrat told me. ‘But Obama makes you feel that at least with Bush you knew where he was on something.\u2019 <\/p>\n

‘When Mr. Bush\u2019s Republicans were defeated in the 2006 mid-term elections, it was the President himself who stepped up and declared that his party had received ‘a thumpin”. The Democratic defeats on Tuesday were not on anything like the same scale but Mr. Obama acted as if nothing at all had happened. … It took Senator Mark Warner of Virginia to admit that his party ‘got walloped\u2019. For three days, Mr. Obama maintained a studied silence about the results while his aides blamed them on local factors that had nothing to do with the President. And to think that it was Mr. Bush who was always accused of being ‘in denial\u2019. More serious perhaps was Mr. Obama\u2019s strange disconnectedness over the Fort Hood massacre of 13 soldiers by an Army major and devout Muslim who opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,\u2019 and was still in our military, somehow, ‘had praised suicide bombing and shouted ‘Allahu Akbar\u2019 as he opened fire,\u2019 and the president says we don\u2019t have any idea why this happened! The president says these kinds of things are ‘inexplicable.\u2019 <\/p>\n

‘Maybe Mr. Obama had been reading the American press, much of which somehow contrived to present the atrocity as a result of combat stress due to soldiers going on repeated war deployments (though Major Nadal Hasan had not been on any) and therefore, no doubt, Mr. Bush\u2019s fault,\u2019 and, in fact, I do believe, ladies and gentlemen… I thought I had a sound bite where it\u2019s Bush\u2019s fault. Maybe, yes, I do. Let me check the roster. I\u2019ve got over 34 sound bites today. Let\u2019s see… Nah, can\u2019t find one. So I\u2019ll stick with the Toby Harnden piece. ‘When the television networks cut to the President, viewers listened to him spend more than two surreal minutes talking to a gathering of Native Americans about their ‘extraordinary\u2019 and ‘extremely productive\u2019 conference, pausing to give a cheery ‘shout out\u2019 to a man named Dr. Joe Medicine Crow.<\/p>\n

<\/a>‘Only then did he briefly and mechanically address what had happened in Texas. On Friday, when most of the basic facts were available, Mr. Obama tried again. It was scarcely any better. He began by offering ‘an update on the tragedy that took place\u2019 — as if it was an earthquake and not a terrorist attack from an enemy within… Completely missing was the eloquence that Mr. Obama employs when talking about himself. Absent too was any sense that the President empathized with the families and comrades of those murdered. It was a reminder that for the past 16 years Americans have had two Presidents who would often extemporize and express emotion. President Bill Clinton could certainly ‘feel your pain\u2019 while Mr. Bush sometimes struggled to hold back tears. Mr. Obama is more like President George Bush Sr., who famously communicated his concern for people by blurting out: ‘Message — I care.\u2019 … <\/line> <\/line> ‘With unemployment now above 10 percent, Mr. Obama needs to show Americans that he can relate to what they\u2019re going through, and take responsibility. It could do him good to show he has a bit of fire in his belly. Perhaps he might make a decision or two based on gut instinct …\u2019 Toby, I\u2019ll tell you why this isn\u2019t going to happen. Barack Obama once said to Harry Reid, ‘Harry, I\u2019ve got a gift.\u2019 Obama thinks it\u2019s his speeches! Obama… Folks, you do not understand the ego of this man, the narcissistic ego of this man. The hardest thing for him to do every day is to turn away from the mirror after he gets dressed. And he thinks that his speeches soar and lift people\u2019s souls and inspire them to great actions and deeds — his Berlin speech, his Cairo speech, the fake columns acceptance speech in Denver at Invesco Field at Mile High. They\u2019re all about the speech. <\/line> <\/line> This speech yesterday, I\u2019m sure he thinks that it was one of the greatest ever. But speeches, folks? Speeches are words. Speeches are not going to convince the Iranians to un-nuke! Speeches and words are not going to persuade the pot-bellied little dictator in North Korea to give up his nukes. Speeches are not going to change anything happening in Venezuela or other dictatorial outposts all over the world. So he\u2019s not going to stop making these empty speeches. In fact, I\u2019ve gotta find this out during the break. There\u2019s a story I missed from over the weekend in the New York Times by Peter Baker in which this whole point was made: Mr. President, these speeches are starting to sound tired and the same and… Yeah, yeah. Here it is. I just happened to find it. <\/line> <\/line> ‘The President Whose Words Once Soared,\u2019 November 8th, Peter Baker. ‘As the most gifted orator of his generation…\u2019 He\u2019s not an ‘orator,\u2019 he\u2019s a teleprompter reader! ‘As the most gifted orator of his generation, President Obama finds speechmaking perhaps his most potent political tool. It propelled him to national prominence in 2004 and to the White House in 2008. And whenever he needs to calm economic fears or revive stalled health care legislation, he takes to the lectern.\u2019 He isn\u2019t calming anybody. This is the point! ‘But the limits of rhetoric were on display last week when the president could not rescue two foundering candidates in governor\u2019s races in New Jersey and Virginia. Has Mr. Obama lost his oratorical touch? Is the magic finally beginning to fade? <\/line> <\/line> ‘Does the White House rely too heavily on his skills on the stump to advance his priorities? It may be too soon to reach such conclusions. The Democrats who lost last week, after all, had fatal flaws all their own. But the results do suggest that Mr. Obama\u2019s addresses these days may not resonate quite the way they did. Speeches that once set pulses racing now feel more familiar,\u2019 \u2019cause they are the same thing! They are the same thing regurgitated over and over again. ‘We live in an era of divisiveness! We live in an age of cynicism! We live in an age of selfishness. My country sucks, but now that I\u2019m here, it\u2019s going to get better, and we\u2019re going to work hard, and we\u2019re going to find jobs, we\u2019re going to…\u2019 These speeches do not inspire anymore. This is the New York Times on Sunday questioning Obama\u2019s one true gift. Here\u2019s the dirty little secret: People are sick of speeches. People want jobs!<\/line><\/p>\n

BREAK TRANSCRIPT<\/p>\n

RUSH: If you read this whole New York Times piece from Sunday, ‘The President Whose Words Once Soared,\u2019 what you learn is that the New York Times is really, really worried. They know this is the only gift the guy\u2019s really got; that\u2019s how he gets people mesmerized to vote for him, and he\u2019s losing it. ‘The risk for any president is that at some point the public begins to tune out.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Maybe we need to call President Obama The Ice Man. He has no emotion, he doesn\u2019t show any emotion. Look how he reacts to unemployment. He\u2019s utterly unaffected! It\u2019s like it doesn\u2019t bother him at all. I want to share with you some excerpts of this piece by Toby Harnden in the UK Telegraph. ‘Barack […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nObama: The Iceman Plummets - The Rush Limbaugh Show<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.rushlimbaugh.com\/daily\/2009\/11\/11\/obama_the_iceman_plummets\/\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:title\" content=\"Obama: The Iceman Plummets - The Rush Limbaugh Show\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:description\" content=\"Maybe we need to call President Obama The Ice Man. 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