Slate lists the top 25. I drives me nuts when Bush’s defenders — his few remaining defenders — claim that he’s a good president but a bad public speaker.
Effective communication is part of the job description, guys. Reagan was able to advance a conservative agenda, in part, because he could persuade the American people to support it.
Well, that and he wasn’t a unprincipled shill only interested in defeating the other party.
You can excuse a certain amount of stammering, particularly in extemporized speaking, because sometimes your words really can outrun your thoughts (or vice versa). Still, after doing it for 8 years you’d think Bush would have gotten a little better at it. More importantly, so often he seemed to be stammering mostly because he didn’t have anything to say, or because he was being disingenuous, or sometimes even because he was trying to use some big words, and he didn’t seem to know what they really meant. We really should expect more from the guy we hired to run our country.
I also think that Bush’s folksy mannerisms got tiresome as he began to exhaust the goodwill of even his supporters. Cutesy nicknames, casual posture, country aphorisms, these are all endearing when you’re doing a good job, but when you’re generally perceived as a colossal screw-up, they make people think you’re not taking the job seriously. I’m glad we’re finally about to be shut of him.
Agreed. A perfect example is the “Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter” quip. This might — might — have been amusing from a competent President. From this one, it just sounded assholeish.