Look me in the eye when you say that, pardner

-By Ann “Babe” Huggett

It’s pretty much an open secret that President Obama is worthless as a public speaker without his teleprompter. What little media footage that does exist of him speaking extemporaneously has more “Uhs”, “Ers” and stammering than a gangly teen asking the object of his juvenile fantasy out on their first date. In fact, Obama’s groping for words and verbal dead ends make his predecessor, George W. Bush, seem positively flawless in his speech patterns and that is saying quite a bit.

Overlaying whatever speaking style Obama has at any given moment are his oddly hypnotic inflections, pauses and dropped tone at the end of sentences. All this we can put up with although four years of utter leftist mendacity on his part is going to drive us all over the edge sooner or later.

However, what really gets my spider senses tingling is the fact that President Obama never looks at the audience when he is speaking. He never makes eye contact. Sure, he swings his head back and forth in some sort of staging attempt to appear natural while reading his teleprompter but he never looks directly into the camera. He never looks at us, the American People.

Now eye contact is one of the most important means of establishing trustworthiness we have as human beings. Too much is considered rude and aggressive but little or not enough is a sign of disrespect. In September of 2008 GOP nominee, John McCain, caught grief from the hyper pro-Obama media for refusing to make eye contact with Obama during a Presidential debate. Yet Obama was just as guilty. Were the two men simply being disrespectful of each other or were they both maintaining their own personal relationship with power? When you look into another’s eyes, you are acknowledging that they have value. When you refuse, you diminish them in importance.

Consider for a moment having to deal with a child, who refuses to make eye contact. You can talk at him all you want but if that child will not look at you, he has established a break in the parent-child relationship that had him at a disadvantage. He, not you, has the power now and, without that eye contact, you are never certain if he has internalized what you were saying to him or what authority over him you still have.

It is the same with our elites on both sides of the aisle and even in the private sector. Stories are rife in upper circles of drama kings and queens, who demand that their hired staff never establish eye contact with them. When Hillary Clinton was First Lady, she demanded that the servants in the White House avert their gaze when she stormed through. Last November, other world leaders refused to make eye contact with President Bush or even shake his hand.

As CNN reporter, Rick Sanchez, noted at the time, “Bush looks like the most unpopular kid in high school that nobody liked.”

British Prime Minister Brown’s gaze was completely avoided by President Obama when they met just last week and were seen walking along White House corridors. Brown was turned to Obama while he was speaking and tried to establish eye contact but Obama looked straight ahead the entire time. When Obama seated himself inside the White House for a photo op with Brown, he was so unaware of where Brown actually was that he smirkingly asked, “Where are the Brits?”

Did the American People vote a spoiled brat into the White House or something more sinister? In his book, Eye to Eye: How People Interact, Dr. Peter Marsh states, “How we look at other people, meet their gaze and look away can make all the difference between an effective encounter and one that leads to embarrassment or even rejection. Honesty and the ability to look someone in the eye are very closely related.” Refusal to make eye contact in a situation, such as an address to a nation or diplomatic relations with our strongest ally, and where communication is vital for establishing honesty, integrity and trust, is a mark of contemptuous arrogance.

The contempt of the arrogant for the people that they govern is nothing new but it is the mark of an oligarch and not the habit of a duly elected President of a viable republic. Americans will tolerate just so much from their leaders as long as those leaders have the trust of the People. Obama’s lack of honest communication with America and his juggernaut approach to the Executive Branch is causing an undercurrent of unease among our military, Legislative and Judicial branches and the very populace itself which may someday erupt into full scale civil disturbance at the very least and an actual civil war at the very worst.

Watching Obama talk down Wall Street, saying that he has other things to do than concern himself with the economy, insult other world leaders, appease our enemies, ensure our future defeat at the hands of terrorists, attack private citizens for exercising their First Amendment right of Free Speech and drown us in wild and useless debt all the while refusing to look us square in the face while doing so is the mark of a dictator.
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Ann “Babe” Huggett is the Associate editor and Publisher of TheRealityCheck.org. She is also co-owner and moderator of Free Britannia.org, a conservative British-American site dedicated to events affecting the Anglosphere.

Starting in 2001 and based on her political essays which appeared on grass roots conservative web sites such as The Reality Check and American Daily, in 2003 Ann became the Senior Writer and Political Analyst for Digital Freedom Network, a small conservative Think Tank in Newark, New Jersey. Ann covered news events relating to the cause of freedom and democracy in North America, South America, and the EU. Her articles were picked up by the State Departmentís OSAC Newsletter, the Knight-Ridder and Gannett news agencies, and the websites for Jewish World Review, American Cause, American Patrol and Townhall.com.

In 2004, due to her political writing, Ann was accepted as one of 30 international entrants in Londonís Centre for Civil Societyís The Frederic Bastiat Award for Journalism Promoting Liberty.

Ann is currently appearing as an on air radio talent as ìBabeî Huggett, with co-host Warner Todd Huston, on Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Conservatism on Blog Talk Radio every Thursday at 11:00 pm ET. She is happily married to her greatest passion – a wonderful British expatriate – John Huggett, whom she met on the web in 1999 and married thirteen months later at the Marylebone Registrarís Office in London, UK.

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