I’d be interested to know what Ed and others think of Matt Latimer’s piece in yesterday’s Washington Post — “A Speechwriter’s Tip for Obama: Silence is Golden.” His overarching thesis, as others have argued as well, is that too much presidential airtime ultimately devalues the currency of the presidential word; that if Americans are seeing all talk from their president, all the time, they may lose their ability to distinguish the desperately important from the mildly interesting, and could respond by tuning out from Presidential pronouncements altogether.
So far so good. But Latimer’s solution?: “Fire the speechwriters.” And then, in what I’d consider speechwriterly overreach, he warns, “It might be the only way to save the presidency.”
Latimer compellingly describes the overloaded agenda the Bush administration’s speechwriters sometimes faced. He also explains why they were stuck with this problem:
Bush’s advisers, particularly Karl Rove, exerted enormous pressure on him to go out every day to talk about anything — even if no one was listening. Each year, for example, we were asked to produce three entirely separate statements to commemorate St. Patrick’s Day. And we crafted remarks for so many Hispanic-themed ceremonies that the president finally stood up in the Oval Office and told his speechwriters, “No más.”
Latimer goes on to say,
The Hispanic-themed comments were an outgrowth of the administration’s all-out push for comprehensive immigration reform. As the president’s proposal became more controversial, Rove — on one of his over-caffeinated days — persuaded Bush to give speech after speech, each time hoping that somehow they’d find the magic words to turn things around. Bush, who when given a moment to collect his thoughts could be a persuasive speaker, was talking so often that his words on the subject lost their presidential heft. Critics noted that his message seemed muddied and his arguments contradictory or confusing.
On Afghanistan and Iraq, Bush was sent out to speak so frequently that he sometimes ran out of words.
I’d submit that Latimer is looking to fire the wrong people. Seems to me, the lessons for the current and future administrations to learn from his experience are to guard against political advisors who strain the power of the bully pulpit… to prevent the schedulers from putting multiple versions of the same event on the president’s calendar… and to make sure the president understands that words alone, however magic, will never be enough to turn a struggling policy initiative around.
