The greatest speechifier in history bombed in Great Britain on Wednesday. Barack Obama may have quoted Winston Churchill, but his stolid speech in Westminster Hall didn’t inspire any comparisons to the great British Prime Minister.
The Telegraph UK tells the tale of Obama without his Teleprompter:
The pictures were better than the words…
…Perhaps Mr Obama was smothered also by his audience, which remained stubbornly unresponsive. For most of the time the President had nothing to bounce off: no applause and certainly no shouts of praise or blame as might be heard in an American church or at an American political rally.
The presidential text sounded as if it had been worked on so hard and conscientiously by a vast team of helpers that it had lost all savour, and been reduced to a series of orotund banalities, of the sort which can be heard at every tedious Anglo-American conference: “Profound challenges stretch out before us…the time for our leadership is now…Our alliance will remain indispensable.”
It did not help to hear Mr Obama assert, after only a minute or two, that “fortunately it’s been smooth sailing” between Britain and the United States “ever since” 1812, when we burned down the White House. Everyone present will have been able to think of occasions when this was not so. Suez did not seem like plain sailing.
We would like to take this opportunity to apologize to our British cousins. We Americans have learned first hand that tales of Barack Obama’s oration skills were greatly exaggerated. We should have warned you.
Our bad.
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