Ronald Reagan thought acting was great prep for the presidency. And recently, Ben Affleck told me that he saw some obvious similarities between D.C. and Hollywood while here shooting his next film, State of Play.
But Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are taking "staging" to a new level.
Clinton was caught embellishing about the degree of tension and danger during a Bosnia trip in 1996. She was taped. Confronted with evidence that Bosnia was not flying with bullets the day she arrived, Clinton released a statement saying that she "misspoke."
But there is no tape of Barack Obama's much-saluted 2002 speech calling the brewing invasion of Iraq a "dumb war." But sound wizards have helped re-create the sense of a crowd applauding to Obama speaking into a loudspeaker, echo and all.
Since there was no original -- Obama made his own.
NPR's Don Gonyea found a couple of people who were there in 2002 listening to the speech and as Faulker might have scribbled, people heard the same thing and told it differently.
According to Gonyea's report, event co-organizer Marilyn Katz said "the crowd was pretty much transfixed." On the other hand, U.S. Hispanic Leadership Institute President Juan Andrade Jr. said:
There was nothing magic about it...There was nothing about that speech that would have given anybody any sense that he was going places. We were just glad that he was one of those who was willing to step up at a time when very few people seemed to be willing to do that.
Obama is clearly getting better and better at his performances -- particularly those that he can stage in sound booths. And it's paying off. After all, he did take this year's Grammy for the taped recording of The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream.
But reading it on my own without the contrived sound effects, I still think Obama's 2002 anti-Iraq War speech was on target and deserves applause.
But we are in an era when politics has finally, definitely, completely become performance art -- and national trust in those who tell their stories will appropriately erode.
-- Steve Clemons publishes the popular political blog, The Washington Note
What's astounding isn't that Obama made this speech....it's Obama's ability to parlay this one speech into some broad reflection on his judgement, character and wisdom.
He attended one rally (one. rally.) in Chicago that received minimal attention. Six months before the war.
There were plenty of rallies in Chicago between that point and when the war began. Some stopped traffic. Many made it to TV.
Where was Obama at those events?
Had Obama made such an impression on the organizers of this rally-- why did they not call on him again? Where's an op-ed, a letter to the editor? The question isn't whether he attended and spoke at a rally....the question is: ...then what?
There are only 13 surviving seconds of the video of the speech and they can be seen here:
http://www.barackobama.com/tv/iraq.php
A simple visit to the Barack Obama campaign website would have elicited that fact!
And to those who claim it wasn't a 'big speech' I would remind them that Sen Obama was not then a US Senator, and in a widespread climate of support for the war at that stage no-one, NO-ONE can discount his courage in speaking out.
And especially not Hillary Clinton or her supporters. They may just be words, but they are a damn site more than Hillary Clinton's Senate vote to authorise the use of military force in Iraq.
Is that why JFK's speechwriter, Ted Sorenson, assists Obama? And how do you explain Obama's three-member speech team headed by Jon Favreau?
You Obamaphiles are so naive at times.