had a stray thought when i was drifting off a, perhaps the, core public role of a president is to appear and give speeches to coordinate national behavior we are now in our second presidency where the president is not good at his job and i suspect this is probably fairly bad
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more on this role. showing up and giving a speech to coordinate behavior partly matter for routine things like trying to pass legislation, but it mostly matters during crises when a crisis becomes apparent the presidents role is to do the following
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1. have a press conference 2. calmly explain the crisis 3. lay out in plain language the response of the government to the crisis 4. firmly emphasize that the nation will rise to meet the challenge 5. "god bless america" this is the script. its not complicated
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trump was not great at this. partly he was disorganized, partly his speeches were sort of disordered, frequently he spent his time taking petty potshots at whoever had recently irritated him, inevitably he was bad at using lofty language and broadly resonant tropes however
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biden is absolutely atrocious. he rarely even gets to step 1, "hold a press conference" when he speaks he meanders, his voice fades in and out, he in no way presents an image of strength. the man is a walking corpse
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in some national crisis yes its ideal to have a president who is both an energetic leader and a strong figurehead but in practice you can get by with a figurehead supported by a solid staff but you better have a figurehead either way because otherwise people will lose their shit
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