The president's State of the Union address may not have been an entirely original piece of work, says presidential scholar Alvin Felzenberg at U.S. News & World Report. The columnist accuses President Obama of "cutting and pasting" moments from speeches by Woodrow Wilson, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and others. The address "contained enough recycled ideas and lines lifted from speeches of others to make historians wince," says Felzenberg. Does he have a case? (Hear radio host Mark Levin echo the charges)
Yes. Obama is running out of rhetorical steam: Whatever you think of Obama's politics, says Mark Hemingway at the Washington Examiner, you have to admit that his speeches have shown "genuine rhetorical greatness." But now the president is "cribbing" bits of that rhetoric from others. Perhaps it's "difficult not to lean on others for inspiration" when writing such "rhetorical bloat" as a State of the Union address — but it is a "bit sad" to do it so blatantly.
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