Prickly City by Scott Stantis for August 14, 2012

waItaminute!!! i think ALL politicians were born with a teleprompter. name one president since kennedy who didn’t rely heavily on his….

ahem…i mean every president since kennedy EXCEPT for carter…

@Darsan54 “big criticism”? It is a comic strip, it is meant to be funny, not really serious. Did you want him to talk about unemployment, debt, and broken promises? That isn’t funny at all.

I speak publicly several times a week…still need notes…what’s the problem?

Why did you go suddenly from talking about Obama to talking about some hypothetical great orator? Didn’t you ever learn to signal your changes of subject?

Graduating from Harvard Business School didn’t immunize President Bush from the “he’s stupid” criticisms. If we can criticize Bush for being a bad orator, we can criticize Obama for relying on teleprompters when he speaks to kindergartners.

Actually, Reagan primarly used 3×5 cards.

These days, almost all politicians and other such public speakers use telepromptrs. As such folk go, Obama is well above average in his ability to talk (or write) on his own. ENORMOUSLY better than the last guy we had in there.

But, the conservative wing nuts have, among their followers, made it a standing joke that Obama uses one, and so any mention of telepromptrs creates a laugh among those people. What can they be thinking while they laugh? Answer: they’re not particularly thinking at all; after all, if they did think, they wouldn’t be Republicans, would they?

@KPOM: No way you can sell that to me. Fumble mouth Bush handle speech with ease? Obama got into trouble with that “you didn’t build that” for the very reason that he was trying to say something substantive about policy. Of course, what he meant is that no one creates on their own the environment that makes things work. “Caesar beat the Gauls. Didn’t he even have a cook with him?” [Brecht]Of course, it is a mistake to try to talk about real issues in American electoral politics. “Morning in America”, “They hate us for our freedoms”, “Audacity of Hope”, “Change you can believe in” — that’s the way to go.

The ‘teleprompter’ thing is getting REALLY tiresome.