Reply #8: Maybe it's just a pet peeve for me, but the repetition annoyed me. [View All]

[TheWraith]

It might be a writer thing; normally I love the style of Obama's speeches, because he's got a great way of building them organically and creating a very smooth, very natural progression of ideas. This particular phrase seemed to me to be jarring because it didn't really progress, he kept going backwards to it, almost like the way he's used "touchstone" phrases like "Yes, we can" in previous speeches. But in those cases it would always integrate better with the rest of the speech, and be a less pedestrian phrase to boot. The line about Congress passing it was almost like using "none of the above" in a speech, a non-melodious phrase you'd expect more in common conversation than public oratory.

But then as I said, I'm a writer, so rather a bit obsessed by this sort of thing.