Obama's pretty speeches

Daniel Henninger makes the point that Obama's speeches, particularly the foreign policy ones, while well done and well delivered, lose their impact because they are not tied to his policy.

With one notable exception -- health care -- there is a disconnect between the scale of Mr. Obama's ideas and his actions, and sometimes even reality, as when he says a U.S-Russian commitment to a world without nuclear weapons would be the "legal and moral foundation" for persuading the world's rogues to do the same. What, exactly, comes after the moral foundation?

The Russian "reset" isn't a foreign-policy statement; it's a sentiment. If you were the head of an Islamic nation, what policy conclusion were you supposed to take from that Cairo speech? All past administrations have been willing to talk to adversaries. When he speaks as president, Mr. Obama's audiences have reason to expect that some concrete actions or policies will flow from seemingly major statements. Other than more diplomats talking, I don't think much of anything is going to follow these. The Speech was pretty much it.

Of course, Obama is not alone in this. His most recent predecessors, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, also gave highfalutin speeches the rhetoric of which reached a lot higher than their actions. Think of Bush's second inaugural with its invocations of liberty - an inspiring aspiration, but offering a much broader world promise than his administration could accomplish. Henninger is correct that an effective foreign policy speech needs to be tied to a specific policy rather than simply a promise of better relations.