Comments | kelglitter: "We didn't get you out of the hole in 21 months, but we did quit digging." --Bill Clinton

kelglitter

"We didn't get you out of the hole in 21 months, but we did quit digging." --Bill Clinton

Oct 28, 2010 12:18

September 16th, that's six weeks ago, Bill Clinton appeared on the Daily Show (coincidentally, the same night that Jon Stewart announced his Rally to Restore Sanity). I personally think he hit a home run - he spent extra time after the show explaining important economic concepts to the audience. You can see his show appearance here and here and ( Read more... )

Comments 2

whymc October 28 2010, 20:17:31 UTC

I, too, was underwhelmed by Obama... but he has a much more difficult task than Clinton did - Clinton, after all, has the luxury of being an ex-president. He no longer gets asked the hard questions, and he's free to be an orator (a task at which I agree that he generally excels) without the nasty baggage that sitting presidents need to deal with.

That said... I found Obama to be unwatchably bad. He is just no good as a public speaker without a teleprompter. He reminds me of some of my smart but shy students trying to give presentations, and I always feel a mix of annoyance and shame when I see him speak, not least of all because being a public figure and spokesperson is a key part of what a president should be doing, as well as a crucial source of presidential power... and Obama fails on this score.

That said, I'll not be switching parties, just kinda wishing that we'd had a better guy in the White House...

kelglitter October 28 2010, 20:58:31 UTC

I didn't watch it last night (we DVR it and watch it when we remember or when the next day we discover via other means that it had been especially good); I watched it today after hearing about it on NPR this morning and seeing something about it later in the NYT.

It might in part have been so underwhelming for me because I remembered the Clinton appearance, and found it spectacular, and thus was holding Obama up to an unrealistic standard. That said, I really hope tons of swing voters didn't hear about it from another news source, watch it, and then decide to vote for Republicans. I mean, I doubt that happened... but I was.. underwhelmed.