Why wasn’t Obama’s speech more inspiring? Just curious….

I’ve been reading reviews of President Obama’s inauguration speech, and they are almost all less than stellar.  Even in an otherwise gushing mainstream media, suffering from a bad case of Obama-rama, very little was said or discussed concerning the speech itself.  In fact, as Wall Street traders watched the speech, the markets took a nosedive, at least partly because of a lack of substantive content directed at the financial markets.  It was the single worst lost on an inauguration day since records began about 122 years ago.  So, I got to thinking “why, of all the speeches that he’s given, on a historic day when truly the world was tuned in, would he not give a rousing, direct, powerful speech?”  Curious, indeed.

First, we all know Obama is a silver tongued devil, as it were, so why would he pick this speech to be less inspiring than his campaign victory speech? Second, we just passed the baton from one of the least eloquent President’s we’ve had in recent memory.  Obama can read a grocery list and sound good….the word “Bushism” is indelibly etched into the American lexicon for a reason.  Obama has shown time and time again that he can stick to a message and deliver it powerfully as few men can – ability is not the problem.  The real problem, I began thinking, is content.

Think back to the campaign and the biggest complaint with Candidate-Obama was his lack of specifics, preferring to focus on the big-picture and slogans such as “Hope” and “Change”.  He never was really good when pinned down to the details, often flubbing facts and figures when pressed.  Could it be that our worst fear, that he really is just a stuffed suit, that while smart and glib, really doesn’t have anything new to add to debate, is true?  Could it be that the reason he never authored a bill in the Senate, that the reason no one (outside of Illinois) ever heard of him before now, that the reason there was nothing objectionable in his past, is that there really is no content there to begin with? Yikes.  When he was running in the primaries, I had flashbacks to “The Manchurian Candidate” every time I saw Obama.  He looked good, he said the right things, but there was simply something missing to convince me he was anything other  than a very good campaigner.  Could it be that his inauguration speech is the first indicator of that hollow ring?

I’ve said all along that the pieces will eventually fall into place, no matter what.  If President Obama is to be the greatest president we’ve ever known, he will be. If he’s a charlatan, we’ll know that too.  These are simply pieces of the puzzle and their possible interpretations, which could eventually go either way.  I now know that the conclusion will not take as long as we might have expected, only because of the precarious state of the world right now, between our own financial crisis, the instability in the middle-east and Indian/Pakistan, the financial problems in the EU, and various and sundry dictators, demagogues and a smattering of nuclear ambitions thrown in for good measure.  No, we’ll know a lot sooner than we might hope if we’ve elected a super-star or a super-nova.  Let’s hope it’s the former, rather than the latter.