The White House's unprecedented use of 'unprecedented'

By: Carol E. Lee
November 25, 2009 12:54 AM EST

The Obama White House is addicted to the “unprecedented.”

Perhaps it was a sign when President Barack Obama sat down in January to record his first weekly address and announced: “We begin this year and this administration in the midst of an unprecedented crisis that calls for unprecedented action."

What has followed is declaration after declaration of “unprecedented” milestones. Some of them are legitimate firsts, like the president’s online town hall at the White House in May.

But others the president wins merely on a technicality, and several clearly already have precedents.

The White House’s announcement of its unprecedented — “a first by an American president visiting China” — town hall meeting with students in Beijing, for instance, drew a collective eye roll in certain circles back home, namely among former aides to President George W. Bush, who had already been grumbling about Obama’s carefree application of “unprecedented.”

“I think I attended a town hall with President Bush in China,” former Bush adviser Karen Hughes quipped with a laugh, recalling a 2002 Bush speech in Beijing at which he took questions from the audience. “I thought: Were they asleep? Or were they dreaming? I remember standing and watching President Bush engage in a town hall that I believe was televised.”

President Bill Clinton also took questions from Chinese students at an event during a trip to the country in 1998, then did a radio call-in show in Shanghai the next day.

The White House’s characterization of Obama’s Beijing town hall mirrored the description staff gave Obama’s address to students on the first day of school, which the Education Department called “historic.” Yet President George H.W. Bush delivered an address to students, as did President Ronald Reagan. Maybe it was the streaming online video of Obama’s speech to students that was unprecedented?

Either way, for a president whose approach to exaggerated critiques of his administration is to “call ‘em out” and who has made an issue of forcing corporate America to expose the fine print, one wonders whether his use of “unprecedented” would pass his own litmus test.

Indeed some of his efforts are unprecedented. Obama noted, for example, that world leaders took “unprecedented steps” on nuclear nonproliferation at a meeting of the United Nations Security Council that he was the first U.S. president ever to chair.

But at times Obama’s use of “unprecedented” is questionable.

Obama has said he “took office amid unprecedented economic turmoil” and that the situation demanded “unprecedented international cooperation” and resulted in his signing of the “unprecedented" Recovery Act. Yet it seems the Great Depression and the New Deal might be considered precedents for the current economic crisis and the $787 billion stimulus plan.

And Obama’s promise of “an unprecedented effort to root out waste and inefficiency” sounded a lot like promises of past presidents.

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Maybe he intended to say unpresidented as in "The nation is currently unpresidented".

His staff should buy him a thesaurus. Then he could substitute words like awesome and magnificent and fantastic and "cool as a freaking moose".

Or maybe he should quit believing that everything he does is a freaking miracle. Then maybe more people would like him. Wouldn't that be unprecedented?

the Unpresident

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UPDATE 11/26/09

Also, we Conservatives have been overusing the phrase WTF when obuma or his cronies pull their latest amazing awesomeness. WTF has completely lost the cachet which it once had. Likewise YGBSM, which went out of style some years ago. I would suggest the high road with Ronald Reagan's favorite: "There you go again", but that is less intellectually and viscerally satisfying than something that suggests outrage and the desire to inflict severe bodily injury on the perpetrator.

I guess I'll have to recommend this subject for a brainstorming session at the next meeting of my violent right-wing militia anti-government terrorist organization.