Sky News in Merry England tells us today of another tale of teleprompter dependency on the part of President Obama.

Now, I’ve had to recite speeches before. To small groups, to classes, for training purposes, things like that. Not wanting to be caught completely flat-footed on the podium — especially knowing what stage fright itself can do to your memory acumen, however remarkable it is while you’re practicing solo — I’d refine a fairly strict speech ahead of time, taking down notes of key points to refer to once on stage, expecting deviation in the details of how I present it (pending what feels most natural, crowd reactions, time strictures, and so on). The whole process, to me, was always stressful and exhausting. So I’ve got sympathy for teleprompter dependence in an abstract sense.

But I’ve also held onto this crazy notion that perhaps the expectations would shift a bit if I were a company executive, a marketer, a salesman, or — you guessed it — a politician. Run-of-the-mill politicians should be fairly accomplished at public speaking: fund raisers, televised announcements, meetings with unions, presentations before the legislature, miscellaneous luncheons, and myriad other engagements would tend, I would think, to polish one’s adroitness in that kind of thing.

Then you take a guy like Obama, a guy who’s climbed a long ladder of positions to reach the top, who’s lauded as an accomplished orator even among Presidents, who’s regarded as earnest and honest, young and intelligent, a refreshing change from the wooden puppets we’ve come to label “politicians” for decades, if not longer. Is it really too much to expect that the guy with enough arrogance to re-engineer our economy and healthcare speak candidly and from his own mind about those very topics?

As it stands, his rather unchanging, inhuman delivery combined with his slowness in realizing what he was even reading, lends the impression that while the teleprompter is the text delivery mechanism for a speechwriter’s latest opus, Obama is nothing more than the Animatronic component. Are any of his ideas even his? If they are, does he even understand them?

I realize that all of these people have been cowed by the media and its insistent 24-hour news cycle, of YouTube and its merciless parodies and mashups, and of the thousands of blogs that will use any mistake as fodder for another superficial attack. But did we really elect a guy who’s too condescending to think the American people can see past that nonsense, and too much of a coward to bear it?

Rush Limbaugh has a funny take on the same event.