Think the Knight of the Teleprompter is not so hot when it comes to, you know, actually speaking? Well, think again. The president is nowhere near as dumb as he sometimes looks and sounds when winging it. Quite the contrary: He’s too darn smart! Meghan Daum of the Los Angeles Times explains it all for you:
It’s not that Obama can’t speak clearly. It’s that he employs the intellectual stammer. Not to be confused with a stutter, which the president decidedly does not have, the intellectual stammer signals a brain that is moving so fast that the mouth can’t keep up. The stammer is commonly found among university professors, characters in Woody Allen movies and public thinkers of the sort that might appear on C-SPAN but not CNN. If you’re a member or a fan of that subset, chances are the president’s stammer doesn’t bother you; in fact, you might even love him for it (he sounds just like your grad school roommate, especially when he drank too much Scotch whisky and attempted to expound on the Hegelian dialectic!).
If you’re not, chances are you find yourself yelling, “Get to the point already!” at the television screen every time Obama’s search for the right word seems to last longer than the search for Osama bin Laden. And thanks to its echoes of the college lecture hall, you may think it comes across as ever so slightly (or more than slightly) left wing.
Read the whole thing. An unintentional comic masterpiece and just a hint of all the treats coming our way from Obama’s media protectors in the weeks and months ahead.
Bonus: Daum blames it on Buckley!