It can’t.
It can’t, because for all speeches great and small, Obama looks to a teleprompter for his lines.
Speaking off the scrolling script isn’t at all unusual by presidential standards. Since Eisenhower, all U.S. presidents have used teleprompters, but none with the frequency of President Obama.
I saw Obama speak for the first time at Widener College in Chester, Pa., the week before the presidential election. My friends and I woke before sunrise and bore the driving sleet and rain for five freezing hours to listen to the man strike his graceful oratorical notes. The crowd at Chester was tired, cold, a huddled mass of 9,000 yearning to be dry. The stage equipment was soaking, the platform was collecting water and turning into a mirrored pool, but the campaign staff paid the most care to preserving the screens of the twin teleprompters flanking the podium: A six-foot, five-inch campaign staff member knelt before the machines on the sopping stage and gingerly mopped their screens with a towel.
When Obama finally took the stage to speak, I heard a speech with familiar contours. Parts of it were so familiar to me from the nighttime news that I could have recited along with him. When I paid attention to him on the news, however, Obama always seemed to look attentively back at me. So I was intrigued by Obama as a live orator, whose gaze was fixed not on his present audience, but rather on two points on the horizon, one center stage left, the other center stage right. And if you happened to be in the tight arc of vision between these two points, well, here’s lookin’ at you, too, kid.
This is something that an audience viewing the pixels of his aspect from a television monitor never notices. But to the audience before him in the same space and moment in time, it looks oddly contrived.
Reporters have taken note too. The New York Times ran an article last week about Obama’s reliance on reading from a screen, reporting that he “uses them for routine announcements and even for the opening statement of his only news conference so far. He used them during a visit to a Caterpillar plant in Peoria, Ill.” During a speech on endangered species, Obama gazed into the teleprompter to recall a visit to national parks as a child. “That was an experience I will never forget,” the prompter reminded him.
I don’t challenge whether national park visits figured large in Obama’s childhood, nor do I feel that pre-scripting each presidential delivery necessarily makes it somehow less genuine than if it were performed extempore. I’m not jealous of the two mirrored screens that stole perhaps seconds of sustained eye contact between me and a future president of the United States after I braved rain, sleet and dark of night for hours in Nowheresville, Pa.
I accept that teleprompters allow the orator to ignore the live audience while maintaining the appearance of sincere attention to a mass audience that presumably matters more. The reaction of that mass audience is harder to gauge. It comes scattered through Gallup polls, petitions and letters to the editor, all of which are better barometers of the national zeitgeist than appraisals of the president’s rhetoric in a particular speech. So far, America loves its prompted president, if 60 percent approval ratings from NBC polls are anything to go by.
I wonder how the sleight of hand facilitated by the teleprompter changes the psychology of the orator. The value of a live audience lies in its reactions — this is partly what has made “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and its counterparts so successful. Television comedy used to be filmed before live audiences in order to capture the chuckles and snorts that happened off-screen. But the the crowd introduced an unpredictability to the studio that was replaced with the always on-cue laugh track.
For Obama, using teleprompters is a way of staying close to his intended message. I imagine that he wants to avoid bloopers as he tries to stick to the screenplay of a perfect presidency, starring Barack Obama. But perhaps the film has been rolling on the bloopers all along, and the farce is really that no one can see what his gaze is fixed upon.
Sophie Jin is a sophomore from Salt Lake City, Utah. She can be reached at sjin@princeton.edu.
Read More
Why can’t lecturers win the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching?
Jerry ZhuLet’s acknowledge those who make “boutique teaching” possible, those who work tirelessly to make our rigorous curricula more accessible, and those who dedicate their time to advising and guiding us through all the challenges we face at this University. Lecturers should be eligible for the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching.
Let’s acknowledge those who make “boutique teaching” possible, those who work tirelessly to make our rigorous curricula more accessible, and those who dedicate their time to advising and guiding us through all the challenges we face at this University. Lecturers should be eligible for the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching.
Princeton’s administration of justice is Trumpian
Frances BroganThe disparity between the University’s approach to Giberson and its approach to pro-Palestinian protestors reflects a concerning trend of appeasing an increasingly emboldened right rather than resisting the threat it poses to academic freedom and the wellbeing of Princeton students.
Secular Opening Exercises? Don’t throw out the baby with the bath water
Frank StrasburgerThe secular makes no room for the spiritual. What Opening Exercises are meant to convey is the spirit of the institution so that it may be kept alive from generation to generation.
The secular makes no room for the spiritual. What Opening Exercises are meant to convey is the spirit of the institution so that it may be kept alive from generation to generation.
