President Obama’s jobs speech

It will be quite awful, I’m sure. Which puts me in mind of the great H.L. Mencken, and his observations on presidential oratorical styles. It is amazing how some things never change. Here is Mencken on Woodrow Wilson (his comments will probably be as applicable to Obama’s upcoming word-swarm as they are to practically every other public utterance that our Haranguer-in-Chief has inflicted upon the citizenry over the last two and a half years):

At the moment, I can only give thanks to God that Hale has saved me the trouble of exposing the extreme badness of the Woodrovian style--a style until lately much praised by cornfed connoisseurs. Two or three years ago, at the height of his illustriousness, it was spoken of in whispers, as if there were something almost supernatural about its merits. I read articles, in those days, comparing it to the style of the Biblical prophets, and arguing that it vastly exceeded the manner of any living literatus. Looking backward, it is not difficult to see how that doctrine arose. Its chief sponsors, first and last, were not men who actually knew anything about the writing of English, but simply editorial writers on party newspapers, i.e., men who related themselves to literary artists in much the same way that Dr. Billy Sunday relates himself to the late Paul of Tarsus. What intrigued such gentlemen in the compositions of Dr. Wilson was the plain fact that he was their superior in their own special field—that he accomplished with a great deal more skill than they did themselves the great task of reducing all the difficulties of the hour to a few sonorous and unintelligible phrases, often with theological overtones--that he knew better than they did how to arrest and enchant the boobery with words that were simply words, and nothing else.

Or perhaps Obama’s speech will sink into the very Marianas Trench of bleak forgetability, in which case the unfortunate Warren Gamaliel Harding might be a better template:

I rise to pay my small tribute to Dr. Harding. Setting aside a college professor or two and a half dozen dipsomaniacal newspaper reporters, he takes the first place in my Valhalla of literati. That is to say, he writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up to the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.

And the Republican debate is being bumped for the speech, I hear. Truly, the guy’s permanent campaign has become one of the most revolting aspects of his reign.