Barack Obama is always fascinating when it comes to leadership intelligences. Yesterday’s speech, was a succinct demonstration of communicative leadership intelligence.Watch:

In an appropriately stern voice, Obama declared, “… our intelligence community failed to connect those dots, which would have placed the suspect on the no-fly list. In other words, this was not a failure to collect intelligence, it was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had.” He went on to say, that this situation was “not acceptable.”
In its editorial wisdom, the Washington Post says, “What was missing from yesterday’s assessment, and what Mr. Obama promised would be quickly forthcoming, was a treatment plan.”
In my opinion, Obama’s speech would have failed if it had laid out a “treatment plan.” Given that the purpose of the speech was to use communicative intelligence to solve a problem–”Obama’s administration goofed up in anti-terrorism efforts”–it had to demonstrate candor and the President’ authority to call relevant parts of his administration to task. And that it definitely did.
A spelling out of policy would have led to this becoming an exercise in analysis and full of operational details. A speech of the kind the Washington Post call for, would have at this point achieved far less than the speech Obama gave.
What do you think? Did Obama succeed in being a leader in this speech?