So we can stipulate that Ezra Klein is a magificent grasper of the obvious—attempts at communication often fail to yield results—and his main source, Professor Propeller Headwards, is a master at locating intellectual imbeciles who are easy to debunk, because they were never bunked in the first place.

Big deal.

But why do the editors of The New Yorker think there's a gullible audience for an article announcing the rediscovery that the earth is not the center of the solar system?

They must think people just don't understand just how mysterious communication is. Notice, I don't say "complex," because "complex" implies that with enough concentration, all the dynamics can be coralled and accounted for. Not with communication.

Klein and Propeller Headwards go so far as to show that in some cases a presidential speech actually has the opposite of its intended effect. As if this never happens in their marital arguments!

And as with a beleaguered spouse, a president's audience usually knows full well what he is trying to achieve with his words … simultaneously suspects the speech is really about something else … has developed infinite conflicting and yet deep-seated attitudes about the issue at hand … is comparing the speech to everything else the spouse has ever said … will compare the speech to everything the spouse ever says in the future. Or, on the other hand, may not be listening at all because she thinks she's heard it all a million times before.

A president giving a speech is a quarterback throwing into very tight coverage.

He knows it. His speechwriters know it. And most of the listeners know it.

But the ball must be thrown, mustn't it? "If you don't try it at all," political strategist Paul Begala tells Klein, "it guarantees you won't persuade anybody."

A welder welds, a teacher teaches, a writer writes and a president leads—partly, through public proclamation.

Could President Obama spend less time giving ceremonial remarks and more time making personal relationships with legislators in private negotiations, as President Johnson did? I have wondered that myself. As an editor of a magazine of called Vital Speeches of the Day, I can tell you that precious few speeches, presidential or otherwise, qualify as being "vital" communications. No one wishes more fervently than I for fewer symbolic speeches and more strategic ass-crackers. No one, except maybe the White House speechwriting team, and President Obama himself.

Are all these speeches really necessary? Could we be better spending our time in another way? I bet these questions have occurred to the White House people over and over again. I will someday put it to them.

But to point to presidential speeches that were ineffective and to suggest that speeches don't do any good in general …

"Who listens to a president?" Ezra Klein asks. More people, I hope, than listen to a New Yorker writer who takes four thousand words to tell us what we already know.

Yesterday we established that New Yorker writer Ezra Klein's four-thousand-word observation that individual presidential speeches don't change the world was little more than a magnificent grasp of the obvious.

Today, let's be a little more generous to Klein, who was only reporting the "insights" of a George Edwards, director of the Center for Presidential Studies at Texas A&M University. "Like many political scientists, Edwards is an empiricist," Klein writes. "He deals in numbers and tables and charts …."

Propeller Headwards once delivered a presentation titled, "Presidential Rhetoric: What Difference Does It Make?" In it, he made a study of President Reagan's rhetoric, and found that it wasn't Reagan's speeches that convinced everyone that tax cuts were a good idea. No, Reagan was merely the beneficiary of trends in public opinion, "rather than their instigator."

"As one could imagine," Klein quotes Edwards as writing, "I was a big hit with the auditorium full of dedicated scholars of rhetoric."

Now it may be true that rhetoric scholars make unsupportable claims about the wonders that rhetoric can work. I don't know. I drink with practitioners of rhetoric, who can and must keep things in perspective, if only to manage the expectations of their client.

In fact, among speechwriters and other professional communicators, the problem isn't their overestimation of the power of rhetoric, but that of their clients, who need to be reminded endlessly that their having said a thing doesn't equal the audience having heard it, let alone believed it.

"Edwards' views are no longer considered radical in political-science circles, in part because he has marshalled so much evidence in support of them."

But mostly, I reckon, because he has presented such "evidence" as a flash of blinding insight—and gotten a fancy New Yorker writer to do the same.

They can't fool us. But their ability to impress others—at least, the editors of The New Yorker—should teach us something about how people misperceive the purpose and the power of speeches and other communication.

But what? I'll think about that tonight and get back to you in the morning.

In his March 19 essay in The New Yorker, writer Ezra Klein asks, "Who listens to a president?"

To paraphrase a president, the answer depends on what the meaning of "listen" is.

As his first angry shot at the supposed power of presidential speeches, Klein offers President Obama's speech to Congress last September, on the American Jobs Act. You remember, Speaker Boehner put the president off for a day and POTUS had to compete with a compelling opening game of the NFL. His ratings were good nevertheless, and the speech was as persuasive as Obama and his speechwriting team could make it.

"But, in the days following the speech, Obama's approval rating was essentially unchanged," Klein writes. "The audience, apparently, had not been won over. Neither had Congress: the American Jobs Act was filibustered in the Senate and ignored in the House. … The President's effort at persuasion failed. The question is, could it have succeeded."

Klein must hope we imagine a White House Speechwriting Office full of shock, anger and recrimination. If only we would have used my elephant-in-the-living room metaphor! The bill would have passed, and President Obama would have gained three points in the Gallup poll!

The idea is absurd, because no one knows more than the people whose value Klein is questioning, just how limited their own power is. Speechwriters know, because of all the speeches they have written, the direct results they can point to are few and desolate between.

All communicators know the percentages. All writers do. Including Klein.

You don't think he's wondering this morning why his well-written, widely read New Yorker piece didn't precipitate a mass firing of White House speechwriters and a reordering of the president's calendar to include fewer speeches and more tee times.

No, he knows that his piece, however good, will disappear into a trillion other words on the subject, into a vast cosmic wash that sways Americans in mysterious ways.

"The world will little note nor long remember what we say here," said President Lincoln once during yet another throwaway ceremonial address in a field in Gettysburg, Pa. And no one would have been more surprised to see the words of a speech that did nothing for the president's approval ratings and failed to hasten the end of a bloody war, chiseled into marble in a monument to himself.

He would be surprised, however, to see an American scholar, seven score and nine years later, lauded in a national magazine for his discovery of the limits of the power of a single attempt at communication, presidential or otherwise.

As for Perfesser George Edwards, we'll deal with him tomorrow.