Now we acquire to hear Barack Obama give his presidential inaugural address.
The throngs have come, in a room for passing they haven’t come in a though, not pure to see him but to hearken to him, to prick up the ears to his war of words. Before he’s halfway through those tongues, they’ll be comparing his inaugural art by his victory speech in Iowa, his acceptance speech in Denver, on and onward.
Supporters talk about Obama’session speeches similar to if they were rock concerts. They brag about having been in the room for entertainments to hear them the way they might have bragged about sentient at Woodstock when Jimi Hendrix played “The Star-Spangled Banner” by the prime of day’s early light.
As much as anything else, Obama won the presidency by words.
Old-fashioned speech full of appropriate feeling
Obama is an orator, a rare thing in a time at the time educated people
But in Denver, when he accepted the Democratic nomination with a speech stacked through programs, policies, issues and specifics, he mildly disappointed those who hoped to be enthralled yet once more. They didn’t fall short in to move into a rational, leisurely future; they wanted to stay with the ancient mojo of one human being talking to a vulgar herd of other human beings.
This is any age of media hipness, when we’re virtuosos of facts bounced distant from satellites. But Obama has reminded us that none of this modern science has the monarch of a human standing up and talking
“The lower orders was quiet now, watching me,” Obama has written of discovering this power in college. “Somebody started to clap. ‘Go on with it, Barack,’ somebody else shouted. ‘Tell it like it is.’ Then the others started in, clapping, cheering, and I knew that I had them, that the connection had been made.”
Connect. Yes, we can.
Connect with repetition, cadences, attitude, rises and falls of tone. , .
Obama’s speech on Super Tuesday: “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”
This is poetry.
WE are the ONES we’ve been WAITing for.
It’sitting old English metrics: WE are the CHANGE that we SEEK, a chant of dactyls, DA-da-da, DA-da-da, as in Longfellow’s “THIS is the FORest primEVal.”
Rock it, Obama.
This stuff works. President Franklin Roosevelt used iambs (da-DA, da-DA) that could have been lifted from Shakespeare (”To BE or NOT to BE”) at the opening of his 1933 inaugural address: “The ONly THING we HAVE to FEAR is FEAR itSELF.” (Though the crowd that day ignored the line
The Rev. Martin Luther King: “I HAVE a DREAM that ONE day DOWN in ALaBAMa … “
Analysts of Obama’s oratory cite the influence of African-American preaching tradition, but the influence is older.
“It’s over the tune, not the lyrics, with Obama,” says Philip Collins, who wrote speeches for Tony Blair, the former British prime minister. In a British Broadcasting Corp. public character, Collins cites “the way he slides down some words and hits others
Winston Churchill rocked it in a chant of anapests (da-da-DA): “We shall FIGHT on the BEACHes … we shall FIGHT in the FIELDS … we shall FIGHT in the HILLS … we shall NEVer surRENDer.”
Plato defined rhetoric as “winning the inner man through discourse.”
Aristotle said good rhetoric should consist of pathos, logos and ethos
Obama has won souls for the greatest part with pathos and ethos. He hasn’t needed logos much because he’sitting usually preaching to the choir, all those shining faces full of hope. In an ugly and dangerous impulsive power in his campaign, however, he used logos to justify the complicated position he had taken on the incendiary racial remarks of his anterior minister, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. It worked for him.
Usually, he is not trying to convince the public who dissent with him
Here’s an ethos riff from Obama’s speech about Wright: “I am the son of a pitchy man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s army for the period of World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’session poorest nations.”
Charisma constituent
And in that place’s the charisma factor in his oratory, the quality that powered President Kennedy’s striking inaugural articulate utterance in the thoughtless winter sunlight that day in 1961: “Pay any price, bear somewhat burden” (alliteration: “pay”/”price,” “bear”/”surcharge”); “Ask not the sort of your unpolished have power to do for you
About a century gone, sociologist Max Weber said charisma defined its bearers as “set apart from ordinary people and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman or at smallest specifically exceptional powers.”
Obama has it now.
With his oratory there is also the agent of cool, which could be a subcategory of charisma. Hence Obama’s demeanor at the lectern
He smothers the highest syllables of a word sometimes, casual as a teenager. He drops the “g” in the rustic manner to be heard in both England and America. He shifts accents
He seems at ease with power.
Recent presidents have hidden their personal power
Presidents George H.W. Bush and Lyndon Johnson hid their aggressiveness behind forced smiles. They were men who acted like boys in hopes of reassuring their listeners. Obama has the charm of a stripling acting in the same manner during the time that a man
Gestures
There is not much to say in regard to Obama’s gestures, because gesture has largely vanished from oratory. A 19th-century speech hand-book listed oratorical gestures: four positions for the feet, nine ways for the hands to show defiance, discrimination and adoration, and so on.
Old pellicle footage shows President Theodore Roosevelt storming around and waving his fists. Former Louisiana Gov. Huey Long would pound his fist into his employee, then circle his hands over his shoulders of the same kind with suppose that he were speaking about helicopters.
Inaugural watchers are not apt to see Obama wave his hands much, except to point. He speaks more in the fashion of television anchormen, through their rituals of modesty and sincerity.
Speeches still have gestures, but they’re further subtle. President Reagan knew that in televised speeches he needed nay more than a savvy eyebrow lift to make a point.
Obama has his smile, his thoughtful stare into the distance and his cool grace.
Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2008647328_inaugspeech20.html?syndication=rss
