The President Whose Words Once Soared

WASHINGTON — As the most gifted orator of his generation, President Obama finds speechmaking perhaps his most potent political tool. It propelled him to national prominence in 2004 and to the White House in 2008. And whenever he needs to calm economic fears or revive stalled health care legislation, he takes to the lectern.

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But the limits of rhetoric were on display last week when the president could not rescue two foundering candidates in governor’s races in New Jersey and Virginia. Has Mr. Obama lost his oratorical touch? Is the magic finally beginning to fade? Does the White House rely too heavily on his skills on the stump to advance his priorities?

It may be too soon to reach such conclusions. The Democrats who lost last week, after all, had fatal flaws all their own. But the results do suggest that Mr. Obama’s addresses these days may not resonate quite the way they did. Speeches that once set pulses racing now feel more familiar. And if that remains the case heading into next year, it could make it more difficult for the Democrats’ own Great Communicator to promote his program and carry along allies in crucial midterm elections.

“Really inspirational speeches like the Iowa caucus victory speech set expectations for Obama’s rhetoric that would have been difficult to meet, and he hasn’t met them,” said Michael J. Gerson, who was President George W. Bush’s chief speechwriter. “He’s had one really large explanatory task, which is trying to motivate people on health care reform, and the polls have gone the other way. He will now have another very difficult task, to explain his Afghan policy, whatever it is, to a country that’s deeply skeptical.”

Speechmaking as a president often presents a sharper challenge than it does on the campaign trail. The audience is different, the desired goals are different, the platform is different. Selling another candidate, as Mr. Obama tried to do for Jon Corzine in New Jersey and Creigh Deeds in Virginia, is invariably harder than selling yourself. And pushing policies requires more explanation than inspiration.

“The difference now is it’s much more difficult to have to explain complicated policies consistently day in and day out,” said Josh Gottheimer, a speechwriter for President Bill Clinton who now teaches the history of presidential speechwriting and is working on a book on the subject. “The stakeholders have changed. Congress matters a lot more. When you’re on the campaign trail, they don’t matter as much.”

Unlike Mr. Bush, who recognized his limitations as a public speaker, Mr. Obama and his team have enormous faith in his capacity for communicating with the American people. When he was considering a bailout for the auto industry and advisers warned of a popular backlash, he expressed confidence that he could explain it to the public. After Mr. Obama gave his speech in Cairo reaching out to the Muslim world, some aides argued that the address itself was responsible for Iranians taking to the streets of Tehran to protest a disputed election.

But David Axelrod, the president’s senior adviser, said the White House is realistic. “No one ever believed that the power of communicating was in and of itself enough,” he said. “It’s important to communicate what you’re doing and why. But without the what and the why, the communicating is of little value.”

“I think it continues to be valuable,” he added. “But ultimately we’re going to be judged not on the power of the oratory but the record. Everybody here understands that.”

Presidential speeches used to be much rarer than they are today, reserved more for strategic moments. These days, in a hyperactive media environment, presidents talk publicly two or three times a day. Harry S. Truman spoke in public 88 times in a typical year, according to “POTUS Speaks,” the memoir of Michael Waldman, who was Mr. Clinton’s chief speechwriter. By contrast, Ronald Reagan made 320 public remarks in a typical year and Mr. Clinton, 550.

With the help of six speechwriters led by Jon Favreau, Mr. Obama is on pace to match Mr. Clinton and likely exceed him, according to White House officials. On any given day, Mr. Obama may address the Tribal Nations Conference and also tape a video speech to grassroots volunteers, to name a couple of examples from a single day last week.

“When you do four or five speeches a day, not any single speech is going to be the biggest speech he ever does,” said one White House official who requested anonymity to speak more candidly. “In a media environment like this, the attention span is rather short so it may seem like the magic isn’t there. But there are still moments when he rises to the occasion when he needs to.”

Mr. Obama’s aides point to several such moments this year — his first address to a joint session of Congress as he was advocating a large spending package to stimulate the economy, his speech at Georgetown University laying out his vision of a “new foundation” for a post-recession nation, his Cairo speech, his commencement address at Notre Dame where he tried to bridge the divide over abortion and his September return to Congress to argue for his health care plan.

While Mr. Gerson contends that months of Obama speeches have not erased deep public concerns with his health care plan, Geoff Garin, a Democratic strategist, called the address to Congress “the best policy address by a president since Lyndon Johnson talked about the Voting Rights Act in 1965.” Following an August dominated by attacks on the health care plan, Mr. Garin said Mr. Obama “was able to lift a debate that had got stuck in the mud up to a much higher place and let Obama and supporters of health care reform retake the high ground.”

But the risk for any president is that at some point the public begins to tune out. “President Bush in 2007 actually gave some pretty good speeches about Iraq and nobody was paying attention anymore and so it just didn’t matter,” Mr. Garin said. “People still pay attention to President Obama. But did anybody hear his speech about education reform in Wisconsin the other day? Of course not.”

A version of this article appeared in print on November 8, 2009, on page WK1 of the New York edition.Sign In to E-Mail PrintReprints

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