‘I Can’t Believe It’s Not Capitalism’
September 17th, 2009 by Steven GardnerInside baseball writing works best when the writer doesn’t appear to give a good darn whether he or she ever works in the business again. In this case is the business would be speechwriting.
GQ has an excerpt, Me Talk Presidential One Day, from a book, Speech-Less: Tales of a White House Survivor, written by Matt Latimer, who wrote speeches for George W. Bush.
Most of the attention has been on Latimer’s retelling of Bush’s low opinions of Barack Obama and Sarah Palin, but I thought the ongoing strife on the economy was most interesting.
“As Treasury started to use the bailout funds to invest directly in financial institutions, Ed wanted to come up with a name for the plan that made it sound better to the public, particularly conservatives who thought this was nothing more than warmed-over socialism. Yes, a catchphrase would solve everything. As we were working on this, Ed called a few of the writers on speakerphone with the idea he’d come up with: the Imperative Investment Intervention. ‘Oh, that sounds good,’ one of us remarked, as the rest of us tried not to laugh. We decided that if a catchphrase must be deployed, surely we could come up with something better than a tongue twister with the acronym III. We started out with dark humor: the ‘I Can’t Believe It’s Not Capitalism’ Plan; the MARX Plan. I suggested that we also apologize to the former Soviet Union and retroactively concede the Cold War.”
At one point in reading this I wondered if Matt Latimer was some kind of hoax. Latimer? As in L.A. Timer?
This piece in the Washington Post turned off my suspiciometer. In it, he makes the same case I was making (privately, to myself) before Obama’s health care reform speech. I was thinking, “Oh boy, another speech. Yay.” You see the sarcasm there? Well, it was there. Latimer, while I was thinking, was writing:
“On the biggest issue of his presidency yet — health-care reform — Obama is following his predecessor’s example. He keeps arguing and re-explaining while his poll numbers drop. On Wednesday he’ll offer another big health-care speech — one he’d be better off canceling — supposedly full of new details. Don’t worry if you miss it. There will be another. And another.”
Latimer, months after his career of enabling his employer to go out on the stage over and over, came to the conclusion that his former job should be eliminated, an easy recommendation to make when it no longer looks like it will be one of your own career options.
Well, then, Obama spoke and did a pretty good job, despite Joe Wilson’s objection. I think I was probably wrong on this one, and so was Latimer. In a general sense, though, we’re not. Too much exposure can water down the impact, which apparently is my strategy when I don’t post all that much here.
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