A Speech, Not a Bite
I wrote elsewhere last week (in Scotland's Sunday Herald) on my sense of how the campaign now segues into the presidency, and won't repeat any of that here. (The headline, "Rebirth of the USA," was the Scottish editor's idea, not mine, but it tells you something about the collective longing that inhabits the world.) But just a few words about the Occasion and the speech.
After a short trip to Washington, I arrive back into conventional time, space, and punditry, to hear a chorus of carping that Obama flubbed his great moment by failing to awe, failing to deliver quotable phrases, failing to bring the crowd to its feet, failing to fire them up for the long fight to come, all that.
But Obama hardly ever delivers quotable, memorable, neatly balanced phrases and sentences. Dreams from my Father, an extraordinarily vivid and gripping book, lacks them. "There are no Red States, there are no Blue States..." from 2004--that's about it. He produces whole sentences that add up to whole paragraphs, don't waste words, don't spin into filigrees. They land, as a linguist caller on WNYC put it, solidly. They land on their feet.
As for the crowd, it was already on its feet. On a hillock at the edge of the mall near the Washington Monument, which was the closest my wife and I could get, the overwhelmingly African-American crowd was all attention. They couldn't even see a JumboTron but they were listening acutely. Unless I mistake myself, they needed no special instructions to feel awed, moved, vindicated, overwhelmed, and dedicated to taking responsibility for their country--which is precisely what Obama was asking them to do.
My sense was that most of them were deeply inside the gravity, the glory, the absolute mindblowingness of the occasion, lugging the kids along so they could say that they'd been there the day the country turned this corner, suffused with respect, and self-respect; and at the same time that they were absorbing the words, not so much to cheer them (what made them celebrate was the very fact of who was speaking those words miles away at the other end of the mall) as to take in the spirit of the words, charging up with them and trying to distill from them a sense of what might be possible as well as necessary now.
Mr. Golis:
I don't know of any real human being -- aside from paid performers in the news media -- who care whether Obama's inaugural speech had any memorable "one liners." Nobody cares.
This is just another example of how totally out of touch much of the news media is with the world that they are allegedly uniquely qualified to be "covering."
January 22, 2009 11:23 AM | Reply | Permalink
I agree 100 percent, Todd. News flash to the punditocracy: this speech wasn't directed at you!
Obama's speech was quite radical in its understated way - the very act of speaking to the American people like adults was itself revolutionary. It also deftly dropped in words and phrases - my favorite was "tolerance and curiosity" - that conjured up a whole host of larger associations while offering up an assessment of our history that was by turns devastating and optimstic. (I myself am a historian, and this speech was a historian's dream - watch the smart commentary offered on the News Hour by Ellen Fitzpatrick and Paniel Joseph for more.) It all added up to an unambiguous call for all of us to work toward progressive change - not exactly flashy, but I'll take it happily.
January 22, 2009 3:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
It was a great speech. One of the sources for the implied criticism " no quotable" lines was Michael Waldman, a thoughtful person and an excellent speech writer but an excellent speech writer for someone whose salesman's personality
meant he was uncomfortable without
"quotable lines" to close the deal. Nothing wrong with that ,just that Bill's personal style should not morph into the criterion for a good speech.
In comparison,Obama's speech made the implicit assumption that his audience consisted of serious,thoughtful adults who wanted and deserved to be treated as such.
I expect I undermine my credibility by revealing I winced 48 years ago when JFK uttered Ted Sorenson's "Ask not what your country" etc. Not only was the structure trite but , worse, the content was insincere. Other than in a crisis,ordinary citizens in ordinary situations don't ask what they can do for their country. (I could go on but that would be off the thread.) And JFK knew that but asked us to lie to ourselves and pretend we agreed.
In the early 50s Fred Friendly put out a record titled I can hear it now including a clip from a 1936 FDR speech in Worcester. I played it for my father.
FDR:
My father leaned back in his chair and laughed and laughed with affection. Of course Roosevelt hadn't had a g l o r i o u s day . It was hot and he was sweating in his top down convertible( I have a photo).And of course Roosevelt knew he hadn't had a glorious day, and the audience knew he hadn't and he knew they knew he hadn't.He wasn't conning them , he was metaphorically winking at them and they loved it.They were jointly enjoying a time honored political performance. If he had enjoined them to "ask what they could do for the country " the response would have been tepid applause and deep disappointment that their friend in the White House had stopped playing square-treating them as shared participants in a great and difficult task.
Obama played square.
January 22, 2009 4:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
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