President-elect Barack Obama

Two Things On This One

The president-elect today:

But understand where the vision for change comes from first and foremost. It comes from me. That’s my job — is to provide a vision in terms of where we are going and to make sure that my team is implementing it.

First thing... Exactly. As Josh Marshall pointed out today, it's the policies, stupid, and those are handed down from a strong chief executive.

Now the second thing... The president-elect has a couple of bad habits when speaking extemporaneously. You've probably noticed. 1) It's not illustrated above, but he often repeats verbatim an attack against him, which only serves to validate the attack, and 2) he has a tendency to say "my job is to..." a bit too much. It was one of my hang-ups about President Bush, quite frankly. The better approach is to simply do the job or to convey by example what the president's job is all about. In other words: show don't tell.