Presidencies aren’t about speeches

I had planned to write something about Drew Westen’s much-discussed op-ed arguing that a different rhetorical strategy could have led to a very different presidency for Barack Obama, but Jon Chait got there first.

I’d only add a general point: Be very skeptical of any critique that goes something like, “If only President X had given the speech I think he should have given, everything would be different.” For one thing, as Andrew Sprung points out, it’s frequently true that President X has already given the speech you wanted him to give, and you just weren’t listening. But more broadly, political pundits, speechwriters, political journalists and others who write about politics professionally like to criticize political rhetoric because they are specialists in political rhetoric. Rhetoric is what they do for a living. And so they have a natural tendency to talk about what they know and overestimate the power of what they do.

It’s a lot harder to confidently criticize economic policy, or legislative strategy, or foreign-policy decision making, much less to confidently analyze realistic counterfactuals in those areas. Doing so requires all sorts of specialized knowledge, and inferences about information most of us don’t have access to, and it’s not easy to work all that into op-ed form. But whereas there’s very little actual evidence that slight differences in political rhetoric actually matter, there’s a lot of evidence that the economy, foreign policy and legislative strategy matter. If Obama’s rhetoric had been 20 percent worse but his housing policy had been 20 percent better, he’d be in better shape today.