Three years ago on Friday, Barack Obama became America’s president. In a country once deeply racist, and where some states’ apartheid laws were still lawful, and enforced, into the 1960s, here, in 2009, was a non-white at the top. And what a disappointment he has been.

Not that I myself expected much. I wholly shared the general welcome for Obama’s skin-colour. But as to his performance, my cynical guess was that “he’ll probably show that a brown man can do the job as badly as any white one”. As, in my view, he has: healthcare still unreformed; policy on Palestine, after a few hesitant efforts at change, still hobbled by the Jewish lobby; Guantanamo, contrary to his pledges, still open. And shilly-shally or plain nonchalance all over the place.

There are solid reasons for much of this: most Americans, for instance, share the Jewish bias about Israel/Palestine, and no president wanting re-election is likely to challenge it. But my doubts sprang, cynicism apart, from a less rational cause: Obama is a splendid orator. He has “the gift of the gab.”

For a politician looking for votes, that’s a gift indeed. But it has no link with sound policy, and not much with great deeds.

Electrifying speech

Churchill’s oratory served his country hugely in 1940, when it had little else to keep its spirits up. Yet many of his geostrategic ideas were other-worldly, from great issues like Indian independence down to a crackpot plan, when he was in charge of the navy before becoming prime minister, to deter German invasion of Norway by sending the battleship, HMS Rodney, into the Baltic — where, without air cover, it would have been sunk by the Luftwaffe within hours, if U-boats hadn’t sunk it first.

Aristocratic, East-Coast John Kennedy spoke brilliantly. Yet what did his almost three years in the Oval Office achieve? Not much: it was crude Lyndon Johnson, from Texas, who put Kennedy’s best ideas into effect. JFK’s only real legacies were the myths of “Camelot”, of a beautiful wife and of his tireless energy for sex with any woman available.

Mussolini and Hitler were both formidable orators; an army friend of mine who had been a student in 1930’s Germany once told me he’d found Hitler’s speeches “electrifying”, even to a non-German no more inclined toward Nazism than to Zoroastrianism. Both men did a great deal — and led their countries to ruin in the process.

Clouded minds

There must be counter-examples. Yet could it be that the brilliant use of speech, maybe of the written language too, tends to cloud the critical faculties of the mind that gives rise to it? Perhaps. But a simpler reason is much likelier: it often clouds other people’s critical faculties too. Especially when aided by the youthful good looks that Obama has and Kennedy had (and that Hitler didn’t, but then in his day television barely existed). Result, and it hardly needs proving: in some fields, such as politics and journalism, those capable of fine language rise higher than they would without it. So be it in the media, where skill with words is part of what listeners or readers pay for. Government is a different story.

PS: For the record, the Rodney was never sent: to their relief, Admiralty planners found an obstacle — it floated too deep to get into the Baltic anyway, and no, they had no pontoons to raise it higher, Churchill’s next potty idea. So? In 1941, Britain sent two giant warships to guard Singapore, and Japan’s airmen duly sank them, without air cover, instead.