Obama Breaks His Own Mold With His Speech On Gun Reform

This blog was originally published on Forbes as Obama Breaks His Own Mold With His Speech On Gun Reform on Wednesday, January 6, 2016.

After having ridden to his first term in office on the engine of his fiery rhetoric, President Barack Obama proceeded to spend the next seven years being criticized—by supporters as well as opponents—of being too cool, too aloof, too dependent on canned teleprompter recitations, and labeled “No Drama Obama.”

But yesterday, he broke that mold. Standing at a lectern in the East Room of the White House with only a few sheets of paper that he referenced only briefly at the start, he returned to his 2008 style with an impassioned speech about gun reform.

Surrounded by relatives of gunfire victims, President Obama was visibly moved. As he spoke of the shooting incidents, he did so fluidly with none of the “ums” that usually punctuate his words when he departs from the teleprompter. His body language was looser than the reserved, erect posture he often strikes; his gestures moved more freely than when his hands grasp the teleprompter backup text; and even his facial expressions conveyed the emotion of his message. When he referred to “first-graders in Newtown. First-graders. And from every family who never imagined that their loved one would be taken from our lives by a bullet from a gun,” he even cried.

As Shakespeare advised, “Suit the action to the words.”

Far out on the other side of the political spectrum, Donald Trump’s Queens-bred, TV-honed fire and brimstone delivery has given him the lead in the public opinion polls, sending Jeb Bush, the presumptive front-runner, to an ignominious back-of-the-pack position because of his “low energy.”

Obama’s tears prompted the expected reactions from the two polarized sides of this highly-controversial issue. His supporters valued his show of emotion while his opponents called them “crocodile tears” and suggested that he used a raw onion to induce the tears.