Barack Obama, the Adolescent President
24th April 2014
Recently, Barack Obama — a Demosthenes determined to elevate our politics from coarseness to elegance; a Pericles sent to ameliorate our rhetorical impoverishment — spoke at the University of Michigan. He came to that very friendly venue — in 2012, he received 67?percent of the vote in Ann Arbor’s county — after visiting a local sandwich shop, where a muse must have whispered in the presidential ear. Rep.?Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) had recently released his budget, so Obama expressed his disapproval by calling it, for the benefit of his academic audience, a “meanwich” and a “stinkburger.”
Try to imagine Franklin Roosevelt or Dwight Eisenhower or John Kennedy or Ronald Reagan talking like that. It is unimaginable that those grown-ups would resort to japes that fourth-graders would not consider sufficiently clever for use on a playground.
April 26th, 2014 at 19:03
Shouldn’t you credit George Will, who wrote this column, with the authorship?
April 26th, 2014 at 21:29
What makes you think that I didn’t? Was it the link to his original column, cleverly marked “Read it.”? Or was it the indented block of text conventionally representing a quotation?
April 28th, 2014 at 16:09
Usually when articles are quoted material the intro states it as such…”The following editorial by George Will,” for example.
April 29th, 2014 at 04:17
Where? Not here.