Obama isn’t immune to the empty phrase — but you can see a serious mind at work, here, and a coherent world-view. That said, even Obama super-fans might hesitate to read this book through from one cover to the other. He’s a remix artist — as was Martin Luther King — and the set phrases and the showy rhetorical tricks don’t half recur. Faced with the scandal over his former pastor Jeremiah Wright, Obama gave a speech on race that let nobody off the hook. Mind you, there are limits: the Sandy Hook speech doesn’t use the G-word once.

Source: Otago Daily Times January 29, 2017 17:19 UTC