Obama’s oratory

"Barack Obama was not a politician when, at the age of 34, he wrote Dreams from My Father (1995). He was just out of law school and had been invited to write a memoir after becoming the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. The book emerged to friendly reviews, sold unremarkably and fell out of print. It’s a personal book, apparently unguarded. In it, he describes his memories of the month he had spent, as a schoolboy, with the father who had lived for most of his life on another continent. The chief thing that struck the child about his father was the way he spoke.

“Whenever he spoke ... his large hands outstretched to direct or deflect attention, his voice deep and sure, cajoling and laughing – I would see a sudden change take place in the family ... It was as if his presence had summoned the spirit of earlier times.”

Obama made his first political speech as a very young man. At university in Los Angeles, he had become involved in student politics and he was called on to introduce a small anti-apartheid rally. It was a crowd, as he describes it, of “a few hundred restless after lunch” – with a couple of half-interested students playing frisbee to one side. Yet as he waited to speak, he recalled “the power of my father’s words to transform. If I could just find the right words, I had thought to myself. With the right words everything could change – South Africa, the lives of ghetto kids just a few miles away, my own tenuous place in the world.” He mounted the stage, he writes, “in a trancelike state”.

On Tuesday, Barack Hussein Obama will make the most important speech of his life. His audience will not be a couple of hundred students idling on a college campus. Instead, he will address millions of people around the world and speak, for the first time, as the 44th president of the United States of America.

With the right words, everything did change. Speaking in public seems to be both a personal need and a political creed for Obama. He is not just a fine orator: he is consciously putting oratory at the centre of his political being – and in so doing seeks to embed himself in a vital American tradition.

The history of the American republic is one that can be traced through its rhetoric: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent ... ”; “We shall overcome”; “Ask not what you can do for your country ... ”; “Ich bin ein Berliner”; “I have a dream”; “It’s morning in America”.

The greatest presidents have tended to be remembered as the greatest speakers. In modern public life, of course, politicians are able to draw on the services of whole teams of speechwriters. But it’s unthinkable that a politician of Obama’s background – his skills in the persuasive arts honed as a community organiser and political activist in Chicago; polished in the debating halls and lecture theatres of Harvard – would simply read from someone else’s script.

The written style of Obama’s books – mellifluous, nuanced – is consonant with the baseline language of his higher-flown speeches. It is reasonable to assume that Obama takes a very close interest in the language and content of his speeches and that he has worked with his speechwriters to ensure they capture, so to speak, the better angels of his literary style.

As lawyer, lecturer and politician, Obama’s “certain talent for rhetoric” (as he describes it himself in his second, bestselling memoir of 2006 The Audacity of Hope ) has been what propelled his rise. And his speeches are filled, thrillingly, with highly formal rhetoric of the sort that would be recognisable to ancient philosophers and scholars of the medieval trivium – in which rhetoric, along with grammar and logic, formed one third of an education. He absolutely pours it on. What Obama’s doing is as old as Aristotle – whose Rhetoric set out the ground rules for the art of persuasion four centuries before the birth of Christ.

“Ethos” was the name Aristotle gave to that part of rhetoric that establishes the speaker’s bona fides. “Logos” – or the actual argument – was only one among three of the persuasive appeals; “pathos” – manipulating the audience’s emotions – was just as important. Think of it this way. Ethos: “Buy my old car because I’m Jeremy Clarkson.” Logos: “Buy my old car because yours is broken and mine is the only one on sale.” Pathos: “Buy my old car or I’ll twist the head off this kitten.”

The formal terms used to describe rhetorical figures haven’t changed because the figures haven’t changed. They still work the same way on the human ear and the human heart as they did in Aristotle’s day.

Take the “tricolon”, for example – three terms in ascending order such as “I came, I saw, I conquered”; or, to borrow an instance from American rather than Roman history, Lincoln’s second inaugural with its line “with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right ... ” This is perhaps the most famous rhetorical figure, other than the so-called “rhetorical question”, and Obama, like most politicians, is addicted to it. Indeed, he often builds his tricolons out of the balanced doubles known in formal rhetoric as syntheton (“men and women”, “colour and creed”, “young and old”, and so forth) that fill his sentences. Last July, in a speech before 100,000 people at the Victory Column in Berlin – walking pointedly in the footsteps of JFK – he said: “As we speak, cars in Boston and factories in Beijing are melting the ice-caps in the Arctic, shrinking coastlines in the Atlantic, and bringing drought to farms from Kansas to Kenya.”
A double (“Boston” and “Beijing”), leading to a tricolon whose third term is itself doubled up, the whole mixture thick with alliteration. This is very far from informal or direct or off-the-cuff speech. It is marvellously and intentionally musical (...)"

(To continue the reading of this article by Sam Leith, in the Financial Times, go to http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/acef9222-e35a-11dd-a5cf-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1)