Ooof! Former Bush speechwriter on Obama's rhetoric

. . .or lack thereof. Michael Gerson writes in the Washington Post:

In Obama's running seminar, a flawed thesis and a flawed antithesis are always resolved by the synthesis of Obama himself -- the speaker as Hegelian culmination of history. In this way, Obama manages to be both academic and arrogant. Instead of exploring the genuinely historic nature of his time, he veers toward messianism. His arrival is "the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal."

But Obama's largest rhetorical failure has come at times of crisis -- when a president's words matter most, and the time to craft them is most limited. His reactions to the Fort Hood murders and the Christmas Day attack were oddly disconnected from the emotions of the country he represents. His speech at Fort Hood was strong on paper but delivered with all the passion of remarks to the Chamber of Commerce. His recent White House speech on the terrorist threat was bureaucratic and bloodless. Both grief and resolve seem beyond his rhetorical range. People once thought Obama could sound eloquent reading the phone book. Now, whatever the topic, it often sounds as though he is.