http://spectator.org/archives/2012/06/18/barack-ogobbledygook/
“First, regardless of his own beliefs, the president will say whatever he thinks people want to hear, and he will continue to say it in the kind of dumbed-down sub-English that he thinks will rally his sorry constituency of class-warfare victims. And second, if he does win in November, it won’t be on the strength and power of his oratory. In fact, Barack O’Gobbledygook is probably the most overrated orator in world history.”
A President who can’t be bothered with basic grammar (or mere coherence).
Some of us live in the past. Others — if you go by one of Barack Obama’s remarks in a speech last week — have been living most of their adult lives in the future. At a fund-raising event in Philadelphia, he said:
There’s (sic) still too many people who are out of work, too many homes underwater, and middle-class families that still don’t have the confidence that the future for their kids and grandkids are (sic) going to be brighter than their futures have been (sic).
This president gets the right agreement between noun and verb only half the time. For the sake of consistency it might be better if he got it wrong all the time. He would then say: There’s still too many people who’s out of work, too many homes that’s underwater, etc. And then there is the howler about the past-tense futures, which is another kind of solecism.
Earlier in the day, Obama spoke, and misspoke, to graduating students at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia. Among other things, he said:
So my expectation is that somebody in this auditorium is going to figure out new sources of energy that help not only make us more energy independent, but also deals (sic) with problems like (sic) climate change.