H3: 03/17/11 Mark Steyn

03171103 Hugh Hewitt: Hour 3 – After a replay of the Mark Steyn interview, Hugh talks to callers about the news of the day.

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H2: 03/17/11 Dennis Daugaard, Mary Katharine Ham, Guy Benson, Andrew Breitbart, James Lileks

03171102 Hugh Hewitt: Hour 2 – Hugh talks politics with South Dakota governor Dennis Daugaard, with the Young Guns, with Andrew Breitbart and humorist, author and National Review columnist, James Lileks.

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H1: 03/17/11 Mark Steyn, Phil Cox, Mike Allen, Frank Gaffney

03171101 Hugh Hewitt: Hour 1 – Hugh talks politics with Columnist To the World, Mark Steyn, then with Republican Governors Association executive director Phil Cox, with Mike Allen of Politico.com, and Frank Gaffney of the Center For Security Policy.

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Serious President is Serious

Listening to the President’s remarks on Japan today, I was reminded of something that  nags at me most of the times I hear him speak: what’s the rush? Does he have something else to do? “Golf,” you say, you cynical partisan, you. Okay. Besides golf. We all know he’s capable of good set-piece oratory, but when it comes to important moments like the Japanese speech, there’s a flat phoned-in quality you wouldn’t expect from the greatest orator in American history. Why?

Because he’s not talking about himself, perhaps. When it’s a campaign speech to rouse the base or rally the masses, well, as the song says, this one goes out to the one I love. Even the Tucson speech could fit in that category, since he no doubt regarded Healer-in-Chief as a position appropriately for the nation’s top lightworker, but when it comes to these briefings and statements, his heart’s not in it. Not to say you want someone emoting every line – no. Stoic is good. But he reads the prepared text with a flat inflection, a predictable cadence, a rote habitual downward inflection; it’s the choppy read of a run-through, scanned for content, not for impact.

Either he’s disengaged from the material, or this is his Serious Person Voice. I don’t know. I do know that he sounds like this is somehow an imposition, a thing to be gotten over with. It doesn’t sound like a man who knows how to lead. It sounds like a man disengaged from the very moment he’s attempting to shape.