One Crisis, Two Speeches

The Jed Report post­ed a short video that jux­ta­pos­es pas­sages from the speech­es made this past week by the two pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates. While I know that it is pos­si­ble to edit video in such a way that it makes one per­son look bad and anoth­er look good, I don’t think there was that much pick­ing and choos­ing of worst/best moments in each of these speech­es. And you don’t even have to lis­ten hard to the words; just look at the speak­ing styles of each man:

The dif­fer­ence between the two in tem­pera­ment could­n’t be clear­er. If McCain is look­ing to be the strong leader who takes charge dur­ing a crit­i­cal peri­od, he’s going to have to work on less petu­lance and blame, and present a more calm, mea­sured mes­sage. Like many, I was ner­vous about the melt­down in mar­kets in the the US this last week and gov­ern­ment takeover of AIG. I had also feared that typ­i­cal­ly unin­formed Amer­i­can vot­ers might flee to Repub­li­can John McCain dur­ing such a cri­sis because he might be a sym­bol of sta­bil­i­ty and matu­ri­ty, like a father fig­ure. Instead, in this speech, he’s more like a cranky old gent you have to humour dur­ing a meet­ing on the street, blam­ing oth­ers on the cur­rent state of affairs.  Oba­ma, on the oth­er hand, is act­ing like the grown-up. After eight years of a man with a child’s mind inhab­it­ing the Oval Office, a true adult would make me a lot more con­fi­dent in the US’s abil­i­ty to make their way in the world.