I’ve been meaning to say this for a long time, you have to believe me.
For all his flourish, President Barack Obama sure falls back on a few familiar phrases.
Make no mistake. Change isn’t easy. It won’t happen overnight. There will be setbacks and false starts.
Those who routinely listen to the president have come to expect some of those expressions to pop up in almost every speech. (That includes you, cynics and naysayers, the ones Obama mentions all the time without identifying who is saying nay.)
Yet in the portfolio of presidential phrases, none is more pervasive than Obama’s four-word favorite: Let me be clear.
So I give a begrudging cheer to ABC’s [oops, AP’s] Ben Feller, who beat me and, I’m sure, many others to the punch.
My opinion? It’s part and parcel (chestnut there, sorry) of his overall dishonesty. (They all are dishonest, you say; but like the pigs in Animal Farm being equal, some are more so than others.) Those catch phrases are b.s., right?
Later: Oh my, Instapundit linked this, and now my neatly graphed WordPress ups and downs of hit numbers won’t mean a thing, will look uniformly flat as today’s and tomorrow’s shoot up. Oh well.
Later 2: Another winner, from Reader D, who hates it
when Obama says, “I said it once, and I’ll say it again . . .” Because then I don’t believe he ever said it once.
And few of us look it up at the time. It becomes a sort of creeping disillusionment if we once believed him or are generally loathe to disbelieve people, a shock of recognition (of a gifted liar) if we hadn’t thought about it.
Blithe Spirit 
Obama’s speach pattern is in 4-5 word bursts with emphasis on the last word – always! 5 words = capacity of the teleprompter? Final word emphasis lets the TOTUS operaaymond.simpsson@comcast.net
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They left out “Doing nothing is not an option.” That’s one of the most treacherous lies used by him to justify bankrupting the country.
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The response to that is what the late Dr. Bob Mendelsohn, self-described “medical heretic,” used to advise about invasive medicine, “Don’t just do something, stand there.”
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“Let me be clear…make no mistake…” He does it again here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgLJ57i8HCM
The man can do it all, Nobel Prize winner and marathon runner!
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You all have nailed perfectly the repetitive “orator’s-gimmick” phrases with which our Leader is fascinated. When you have the opportunity, listen to some of Adolph’s rantings and note the same kind of fascination with musical, but meaningless repetitions. All that’s lacking is the chanting approval of the Crowd.
It is also important to note the equally repetitive gestures that maintain a kind of rhythm urging the audience to join in the rising and falling emotion of the moment. (Another quality reminiscent of Der Fuhrer’s speaking style.)
MIssing from this anaylsis is several obvious comments detailing the speak-er’s use of facial expressions, gestures, and rhetorical content to influence the audience in order to entrance and carry it to agreement in its naivete.
You may easily be duped into affection and approval for the MAN, but beware of the content and implicatons of his words. Therein lies danager.
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