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Message: I'm Insecure -- By: Rob Long

Rule One of great acting is, Do not read the stage directions.
 
You don?t, for instance, wrap up Hamlet?s big Act Two soliloquy -- ?#...#the play?s the thing / Wherein I?ll catch the conscience of the King? -- and then say ?Exit.? 

Years ago, during the George H. W. Bush administration, public-opinion surveys began to register a troubling trend for a president campaigning for reelection: More and more people felt that Bush just didn?t care about people?s suffering during the (fairly shallow) recession of the early 1990s.

You?ve got to send them the message that you care, they told him. So, dutifully, in his next big public outing, he tried to send the message to the voters that he cared. He wound up a boilerplate stump speech by declaring, with as much passion as he could muster, ?Message: I care!?

No, no, Mr. President, you could imagine his advisers saying. The ?message? part is for us, it?s an internal thing. You?re supposed to give them the message that you care. By showing that you care.

Right, he might have replied, I did that. How much clearer could I have been?

You?re not supposed to say the ?message? part, they might have replied as the presidential limo sped away.

But it says right here on the talking-points card you gave me, he could have shouted back. Right here! ?Message: I care!?

But by that time, a pudgy governor of Arkansas had already bit his lower lip, felt our pain, and made us temporarily ignore his brittle wife. That was a guy who understood Rule One.

The truth was, Bush really didn?t care. The 1990-91 recession was almost over by the time he started getting walloped in the polls, before someone had handed him a memo titled ?Messaging That Bush Cares? or something equally futile. Unemployment, slow growth, these things had already started turning around. There was nothing for him to do. And as all grownups know, recessions happen.

But saying ?Message: I care!? captured all of the loose threads out in the crazytown of public opinion and braided them together into part of the rope that ended up hanging the first Bush administration.

Twenty years later, everyone seems to be exercised over President Obama?s recent declaration that his big project, when confronting the massive, gushing BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, is to figure out ?whose ass to kick.?

Talking to Matt Lauer on NBC?s Today show, our skinny president said the following deeply Freudian thing: ?I don?t sit around just talking to experts because this is a college seminar. We talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers -- so I know whose ass to kick.?

I?m not as interested as the rest of the world is, I guess, in the ?whose ass to kick? part of the declaration. Show more emotion, I?m sure Obama?s advisers have been saying to him since the oil started to gush. Be more passionate. Send people the message that you care. And so he did -- absurdly, but that?s what happens to presidents when they hit the oil slick. At least he didn?t say, ?Message: I?m going to kick some ass.?

Here?s the part I find the most interesting: ?I don?t sit around just talking to experts because this is a college seminar.? This from the former professor who ran a health-care-reform summit meeting like the cranky chairman of a faculty committee at a third-rate college. Who finds it impossible to describe something as simple and clear as Islamic fundamentalism without weasel-wording equivocation. Who, in other words, thinks this is a college seminar.

I am not, let me stipulate at the outset, a licensed psychiatrist. My understanding of the works of Sigmund Freud are cursory -- college psychology class; skimmed the reading, bluffed my way through the exam -- and it pains me to admit that I am, still, not legally allowed to prescribe drugs.

But I know the basics. I know that we get weird in the pre-verbal stage of development. I know that we have malignant egos. I know that we end up marrying the closest approximation to our most complicated parent. And I know that when we say things, we often inadvertently reveal the truth about ourselves. A Freudian slip, for example, is when we say one thing when we mean a mother. Another. You know what I mean.

When a person -- especially someone as tightly wound as our president -- emphatically declares something that sounds a little too specific, watch out. He?s not making a point; he?s reading the stage directions. He?s telling you what he?s afraid you think of him, and he?s often correct.

Psychiatrists love this little trick, because it makes their work so incredibly easy. You just wait for the patient to say something weird about himself, and you pounce. Voters do the same thing. When George H. W. Bush tried to show voters the scale of his caring by barking, ?Message: I care!? they all suddenly saw the president of the United States stretched out on a Mies daybed, and they scribbled in their notebooks, ?Patient seems concerned re: not caring impression. Patient may lack proper sympathy.?

But psychiatrists don?t fire patients -- not at $300 per session. Voters, on the other hand, positively relish it.

All of this is a little unfair, of course. A president who spent his entire working life in either a crackpot left-wing nonprofit or a law school -- although when you say it like that, it?s hard to tell the difference -- couldn?t be expected to know anything about the complexities of deep-water drilling, the physics of oil under pressure, the trajectory of an oil slick as it slimes its way to shore.

So, yes, it?s easy to imagine that there?s been a bit of the college seminar going on there, in the Oval Office.

But why so defensive? Or, as we might have scribbled in our notebooks as President Obama took his place on the couch: ?Patient v. v. defensive re: lack of oil knowledge. Ego bruise? Anger due to inflated sense of self vs. inability to stop oil leak? Anger due to sense of self under fire from oil leak, voters, etc.? Sense that like college seminar, he is all talk, no action??

All of which is accurate. And all of which seems to be what voters are thinking.

Especially when he added, gratuitously, that he wanted to know ?whose ass to kick,? when everyone knew that what he really meant was ?whose ass to sue,? which doesn?t sound very butch.

It?s been said that the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is Obama?s Katrina, but that?s really not accurate. It?s Obama?s ?Message: I care? moment. It?s when he started to read the stage directions.

A brilliant actor once told me that the hardest thing to play is drunk. And then he told me how to do it.

You play not drunk. You don?t play a guy weaving and slurring and bumping into stuff. You play a guy consciously, deliberately, carefully not doing any of those things. The way you indicate how immensely incapacitated you are, in other words, is to act super, super sober, to declare, in other words, that not only are you not drunk, you?re the opposite of drunk. Which just makes you seem incredibly drunk.

Audiences find this hilarious. Voters, well, we shall see.

-- Rob Long is a contributing editor of National Review and a contributor to Ricochet.

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Full post as published by Bench Memos - National Review Online on June 30, 2010 (boomark / email).