Huntley: Look for Obama to give a great speech — but not much else

Here’s one prediction for this week’s Democratic National Convention that is 99 percent certain: President Barack Obama will give a better sounding acceptance speech than Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney did the other day.

Oratory is what Obama does.

It’s too bad he can’t run the country as well as he can deliver a highfalutin’ speech.

Yet, it is amazing that a continual theme of Obama, his supporters and his apologists in the mainstream media is that the president’s problem isn’t his policies but his failure to communicate and explain them to the American people.

Paul Ryan, the GOP vice presidential nominee, absolutely nailed it when he told the Republican National Convention, “Ladies and gentlemen, these past four years we have suffered no shortage of words in the White House. What’s missing is leadership in the White House.”

Obama’s oratory is characterized by a puffed-up grandiosity, and Romney nailed that in his acceptance speech: “President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and to heal the planet. My promise is to help you and your family.”

Obama’s left-wing media acolytes immediately pounced that Romney was dissing climate change. Nonsense. With 23 million Americans unemployed or under-employed, Romney merely recognized that the here-and-now problems making life miserable for millions of Americans had been neglected by a president who prefers blue-sky rhetoric on climate change to facing the facts about what’s need to revive the economy.

It may not have been as pretty as Obama’s orations, but Romney’s speech, a mix of the personal and policy, was good enough to persuade persuadable voters that he’s qualified to sit in the Oval Office.

Then Romney did something to act presidential. The day after the Tampa convention he flew to Louisiana to assess the storm damage from Hurricane Isaac. Romney said he was there to draw attention to the plight of the victims and relate to the country that they need help.

Guess what? Obama had to play catch-up. Just hours after the White House got word of Romney’s visit to storm victims, it announced Obama was canceling a campaign appearance in Ohio Monday to fly to Louisiana. It sure looks like a presidential responsibility got lost in all the campaigning and fund-raising Obama has been doing of late.

After that embarrassing lapse, Obama will be happy to bask in the spotlight at his party’s convention in Charlotte. The focus will be his speech Thursday night. And there’s little doubt that it will sound better than Romney’s. But Obama will have to explain why four more years of the policies that have failed for the past four years will somehow restore prosperity.

So, yes, Obama will give a soaring speech, filled with beautiful words, mellifluous phrases and glowing sentences sure to send a thrill up the leg of MSNBC’s Chris Matthews and other Obama cheerleaders in the left-wing media.

But, will millions of Americans weary of four years of soul-draining economic misery be satisfied with more words from Obama? They just might deliver a verdict on yet another Obama speech that would be, in the words of the famous Bud Lite commercial:

“Great taste, less filling.”