Listening to Barack Obama grates on me like when my fifth grade teacher, disdaining the conventional classroom torture of mis-held chalk on the blackboard, did it with his teeth. It took me a while to figure out, and to realise why his staccato cadence reminds me of the Eighties: “Sledge Hammer” or
“Square Pegs”, anybody?
Well, I finally twigged to why! It's um-um-um Obama reminding of me of Ma-ma-ma-Max Headroom! There is precisely the same delivery, and the sense that what you're hearing is a bunch of prerecorded audio clips spliced together on the fly by some not very competent civil servants at Minitrue. I have taken the liberty of re-mixing the audio from Obama's press conference of 2009-07-22 to produce a “content-free edition”—I have extracted and concatenated all of the verbal tics, clichés, and temporising locutions so you can digest the essence of Obama's rhetoric without enduring all of the prevarications and preposterous populist pap which they served to cement.
You can almost see the heavily spliced tape run past the head as you listen to this (or to the original). “Um—um—um…”.
