Judis is Annoying

He thinks the speech was a "hodgepodge" and would rather have a 20-point white paper and power point presentation on the West Front.

You can say, of course, that I am treating his speech as a political argument, and not as a piece of oratory, but the problem is that it existed in the netherworld between inspiring oratory and political argument. It had intimations of both, but lived up to the promise of neither. I suspect Obama chose this ambiguous course partly because of the difficulty of the occasion. Argument requires pros and cons, truth and falsity, truth-tellers and misleaders, but an inaugural speech is an instrument of national, and even international, unification. Thus, some who might have actually qualified as misleaders and villains (e.g. the greedy) make only a fleeting appearance, while scorn is heaped upon others (the "cynics... who question the scale of our ambition") who are inventions of the moment rather than real adversaries. That's certainly understandable, but it didn't make for good oratory or argument.