Obama Weekly Address: Call for Unity as 9/11 Approaches

posted at 2:24 pm on August 27, 2011 by Howard Portnoy
[ Obama ]   

In his weekly address this morning, President Obama waxed wistful for the spirit of patriotic dedication and consanguinity that united Americans after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. He spoke of

how the worst terrorist attack in American history brought out the best in the American people. How Americans lined up to give blood. How volunteers drove across the country to lend a hand. How schoolchildren donated their savings. How communities, faith groups and businesses collected food and clothing.

Those of us who were in New York or Washington on that fateful morning need no reminder of how events went down or of the selflessness and camaraderie that joined all Americans on that day and in the weeks to follow. I was among those who resolved to donate blood on 9/11, but by the time I arrived at Bellevue Hospital, just before 9 a.m., I was too late. So many others who had the same idea beat me to it, and emergency personnel were turning away volunteers.

The president is quite correct when he says “we were united” that day, as one suspects we would be again were a tragedy of similarly imponderable proportion to occur on his watch. (That one did not, happening instead during the administration of the man he likes to hold accountable for the nation’s current woes, even though George W. Bush hasn’t been president for the better part of three years.)

Sadly, about halfway through his address, President Obama drifts off point, blowing an opportunity to say—or at least try to say—something meaningful. Instead, the speech devolves into a PSA for community service, one of his pet projects as a former community organizer.

It is hard to know whether the president still has the ability to say or do anything to bridge the yawning chasm of rancor that divides our country. Certainly, he lacks the trust of many on both sides. A recent Rasmussen survey finds that 68% of all Americans believe the partisan rift in Washington is likely to worsen in the near-future. Almost half (47%) view Barack Obama’s style of governance as partisan, but these are hardly recent trends. In April of 2009, a Pew poll found the gap in Obama’s approval rating, at 61%, to be the most partisan in the modern era.

It would take the widest-eyed of optimists to claim that the ill will that poisons our national dialog isn’t largely a quagmire of the president’s making. He has missed no opportunity to take shots at Republicans, at the conservative media, and even at members of the electorate (in the persons of the Tea Party). He likes nothing more than to deliver snide quips about “the enemy” before audiences of approving supporters as though a protective shield insulates the rest of us from his jabs.

For all his campaign talk of mending fences and bridging the partisan divide, for all the hype since about his oratorical skills, the president has been an abject failure at both. As for his speechifying, right now I’d be happy if he could reach the same level of rhetorical polish as Rodney King.

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