Gilding The Lilly

President Bush made a speech just yesterday defending his position of continuing operations in Iraq. Naturally, as soon as it was over there were Democratic Senators making a statement in response to the Presidents' remarks. I do not fault them for this at all, in fact I would have been surprised if they hadn't. The two Senators that I saw talking were John Kerry and Harry Reid.

It is not my intention at this point to get into who was right and who was wrong in this, or breaking down and analyzing what any of them said, for now, I'm far more interested in the delivery.

It is no secret to anyone who has ever paid any attention at all to pretty much any speech or statement ever given by President Bush that he is not a good public speaker. In fact, I would go so far as to say that he is a fairly poor communicator of ideas, at least in a public forum (since I've obviously never had a private conversation with the man, I can't comment on that aspect), and his speech, as usual, was kind of difficult to follow. Nothing new there.

What I am more interested in is the delivery of the response from the Democrats. John Kerrys' initial statement was flowing and eloquent, and even somewhat convincing. He sounded utterly believable, and really seemed to know what he was talking about. Takes a lot for me to say that since I don't care much for Senator Kerry. The response would have been quite powerful if they had left it there and walked away. Of course, they didn't do that. When Senator Kerry finished it was time for Senator Reid to speak, but he didn't have anything new to say really, mostly he just repeated what Kerry had just said, and did it badly. Reid sounded at least as bad and hard to listen to as Bush. Then, after he finally finished rambling on, he handed it back to Kerry, who really had nothing new to add, and so restated some of his original remarks, but not nearly so well this time. When I was in school I was taught that this is called "gilding the Lilly", that is, going on and on, well past the point where you get it right, and ultimately ruining the whole thing.

The Senators could have done so much better if they had known when it was time to shut up and walk away, but alas, expecting that from a politician is much like expecting there to be enough cashiers at Wal-Mart, as desirable as it is, it's never going to happen.