Where did this reputation for eloquence come from? Glibness (w/ teleprompter), maybe.

****Google "great quotations of Obama" and get ...nil. Cliches, repetition characteristic of revival tenting, hyperbole...perhaps but not much memorable. Worse, much of what he says is not to be believed and does not any longer even get the benefit of the doubt. Who still believes him when he declaims that the healthcare bill will reduce the deficit and "save Medicare" or that the nation will go bankrupt without it? Only those who turn off their minds and only listen to the sounds, not the words. Congressman Wilson was prescient when he burst out "You lie." Now more and more people think it if they don't have the temerity to call it out.****
http://tinyurl.com/ye5kcr3
On The Precipice
...an illuminating choice of words...We are indeed "on the precipice" — staring into an abyss of statism...It was another of history's memorable Freudian slips.
Neville Chamberlain in 1938 disembarked from his plane and told the crowd, "This morning, I had another talk with the German chancellor, Herr Hitler, and here is the paper which bears his name upon it, as well as mine." Forever, he will be remembered for waving his worthless "piece of paper."
President Bill Clinton a decade ago told the grand jury investigating whether he committed perjury that "it depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is." Forever, he will be remembered for twisting language into pretzels to avoid the truth.
President Jimmy Carter in his infamous 1979 "Malaise Speech" blamed Americans for a national "crisis of confidence" and "loss of a unity of purpose for our nation." Carter's solution: Carpool and "set your thermostats to save fuel. ... I tell you it is an act of patriotism."
Carter didn't know it, but he was describing a crisis of leadership — his — that Americans, unified in purpose, fixed the next year by electing Ronald Reagan. Forever, Carter will be remembered as the personification of American self-doubt and decline.
Has Barack Obama just written his own historical epitaph? Will he be the figure who pushed America off the precipice, into a bottomless pit of socialism?
Much of what the president said in his Tuesday statement was patently false....the Senate bill, ...won't mean that "families will save on their premiums." Independent studies make it clear that premiums will go up by thousands of dollars.... The president claims "the CBO has said that this is a deficit reduction." But as Sen. Robert Bennett, R-Utah, who sits on both the appropriations and banking committees, recently told Fox News' Neil Cavuto, the definition of "deficit-neutral" that Democrats have been using "means it's going to cost you over $1 trillion, and we are going to find $1 trillion either in Medicare cuts or increased taxes, so that we end up with the same number at the bottom line."
Speaking of the Congressional Budget Office, after candidate Obama last year promised a $2,500 annual reduction in health premiums annually for average families, the CBO has warned of premium increases of about $5,000 a year....with public support at 41% according to IBD/TIPP and 35% according to Gallup — not to mention two-thirds of doctors opposed to Congress' plan, as IBD/TIPP also found — most Americans clearly don't want to take a plunge like this.****Obama claimed/claims that most American doctors support the plan ( although he admits that no one knows what "the plan" is yet.)He claims support and consensus when there isn't any (even should consensus be an endorsement.)****This is becoming increasingly true and even obvious: much of what he says is false and immediately, and demonstrably false.****//
http://tinyurl.com/y8r23kl
Obama's War of Words Eloquence without action is soon forgotten. By WILLIAM MCGURN
Whatever else he may be, Barack Obama is a gifted orator whose words will be remembered by generations. Or will they?...President Obama has delivered two critical war speeches. At West Point he outlined a new policy for Afghanistan, committing 30,000 additional troops to deal with the threat that militant Islam continues to pose to the American people. In Oslo scarcely a week later, he used the occasion of his Nobel Prize to deliver a bracing reminder that the reality of evil requires nations willing to confront it.
Now comes the question put to all presidential speechwriters when a wartime president gives a major address. What did you think? Did he make his case? How will these speeches be treated by history?
The answer, surely, is that the measure of a speech goes beyond words....ultimately a war speech will be judged as much on the success of the war as on the eloquence of the words. Think of the great war speeches, starting with the Gettysburg Address. When Abraham Lincoln delivered those words at a cemetery for the Union fallen in 1863, he justified the terrible human toll on the promise "that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."...Had Lincoln not committed himself so single-mindedly to that effort,...would schoolchildren still be memorizing his words today? Or consider Franklin Delano Roosevelt....there can be no debate that his exhortations resonate even today because they were backed by policies that defeated totalitarian threats ...Ditto for John Kennedy. ...Kennedy adviser and speechwriter Ted Sorensen did not dismiss the power of the spoken word, but neither did he confuse it with action. "[A]fter all is said and little is done, a speech—even an elevated, eloquent speech—is still just a speech," he wrote. "Saying so doesn't make it so." ****This is, so far, the hallmark of Obama: saying so doesn't make it so...And saying it so often and repetitiously.When does the man have time to think, let alone to do?**** ...the point about Reagan is that when he spoke, he wasn't acting. When Reagan declared that the "last pages" of communism were being written or called for the Berlin Wall to come down, he believed it—and his policies reflected those beliefs....We remember Reagan at Berlin because the wall did come down—and he did his part to help bring it down."...In wartime, people soon tire of lofty words that do not seem borne out by events. In September 2001, with the twin towers still smoldering and the Pentagon wounded, President Bush delivered a war address to a joint session of Congress (which I had no part in, so am free to praise) that ranks with the best of FDR. Whether that speech ever receives its full due depends in part on how this war ends. The same goes for President Obama. At West Point and Oslo, he spoke...The irony is that whether these fine speeches are remembered by history depends on a word he didn't use in either one: victory.