Form follows function

You can't write for President Obama as if he were still Candidate Obama. No longer is he giving a variation on a stump speech that he knows by heart. He's reading something that has just been handed to him, written about something that just happened. There is no time to familiarize himself with it. He has to dive in and trust that the sentence he's reading will come out in a good place. It is a time for simple forms--which is not what he got today. Try reading this cold with the cameras rolling:

The businesses that are shedding jobs to stay afloat -- they can't afford inaction or delay. The workers who are returning home to tell their husbands and wives and children that they no longer have a job, and all those who live in fear that their job will be next on the cutting blocks -- they need help now. 

If you saw the President delivering those lines, you saw fear and anxiety. The first sentence gave him pause when it started over in the middle. But in the second one, he considered taking matters into his own hands and then decided to ride it to the end and hope there was a predicate somewhere over the horizon. "The workers who are returning home to tell their husbands and wives and children that they no longer have a job"...give me the verb, give me the verb -- no verb, not yet..."and all those who live in fear"...should I bail now, 31 words into this sentence with no end in sight--uh, no, in for a dime, in for a dollar..."that their job will be the next on the cutting blocks -- they"...whew, a predicate at last..."NEED HELP NOW." 

Forty words into the sentence, he finds out where it's going. That might work in a speech he had time to rehearse; it serves him poorly when he's delivering it on the fly.