The speeches that made Barack Obama

Posted December 13, 2009

More than any president since Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama reveals himself through the speeches he gives at critical moments. Like FDR, Kennedy, and Lincoln, Obama has given his best speeches under pressure, before hostile audiences, or in the face of excruciating pressure. He has done this often enough that it is worth laying these speeches side by side and taking a look at what they teach us about his presidency.

INTRODUCING BARACK OBAMA

On two occasions Obama had a chance to introduce himself to a national audience. He made the most of both opportunities.

The first came in 2004 when John Kerry asked him to give the keynote address to the Democratic National Convention in Boston. Obama was still an Illinois legislator but had won the nomination to run against the incumbent Republican for the US Senate. (For a sense of trajectory, recall that four years earlier, Obama was an obscure Illinois legislator who could not get credentials to attend the convention and that four years later he accepted his party’s nomination as president.)

It is fun to watch Jesse Jackson and Hillary Clinton applaud this speech. Jackson knows that he has been eclipsed as the voice of Chicago’s progressive black community and he is plainly none too thrilled. Hillary has no clue, except that she probably recalled Bill’s famous keynote to the convention, where the only applause line he got was “…In conclusion…”.

Already in this speech, you can see the hallmark elements of Obama’s worldview and his speeches

He has mastered the standard oratorical devices. Obama makes excellent use of standard oratorical devices, including straw men (“They said this day would never come”), slogans (“change we can believe in”), a sense of moment (“on this cold January night”), an attractive wife (“the rock of the Obama family”), call and response (“are you with me?), and a preacher’s cadence.

He has mastered his temper. Obama also runs cool — even when he is passionate, he is controlled and is absolutely never angry in public (seeing a red-faced southerner like Clinton lose it in public was unattractive, but for a black man to get angry would be fatal. We may have become more racially tolerant, but we are not racially indifferent and whites prefer black leaders who act nice).

He loves complexity and embraces contradiction including finding unity where little if any exists. Thus “hope amidst hopelessness” and “not red states or blue states but the United States”.

He offers his own unlikely history as example and metaphor. “In no other nation is my story possible” appears here for the first time and regularly thereafter.

He takes a long view of US history and positions himself on the shoulders of well known giants and obscure toilers and soldiers. This lets him pay fitting tribute to those whose work and sacrifice made his career possible and helps him communicate a sense of historic inevitability about his rise to leadership.

He comfortably marries ideas with institution-building, believing as politicians must, that ideas don’t matter until they are given concrete form and resources by public institutions.This is less clear in his convention speech unless you take garden variety political endorsement as institution building, but is very clear in his Cairo speech and his Nobel acceptance.

He believes in the power of a just and forgiving God and is concerned about those who twist their Gods to justify religious or ethnic bigotry.

He is courageous. For presidents, popularity is power. You cannot get things done without being popular and, not surprisingly, you therefore tend to say what people want you to say. Most presidents would not advance a theory of “just war” to the Nobel Peace Prize committee, explain black resentment and anger when confronted with the comments of a thoughtless pastor, criticize jihadist Islam to students in Cairo, call on his party to support a military surge after 8 years of frustrating war. These are not the things most Presidents do often.

He is a cold war liberal. This is a very dirty word with most Democrats today, conjuring as it does visions of Scoop Jackson and Harry Truman. But Kennedy was a cold war liberal and so am I. It reflects a philosophy that many observers, starting I think
with David Brooks, have called Niebuhrian, after progressive US Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr, who argued for the importance of incremental steps forward in a flawed world, was best known for his Serenity Prayer, typically now recited as “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can change, And wisdom to know the difference.” Brooks cites an even better summary of Niebuhr’s worldview: “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”

He insists on personal responsibility, even and especially by victims. This is of course, a conservative view usually overlooked by liberals — to our eternal detriment, as it turns out.

This is the speech that put Obama on the screen of many political junkies, myself included. For weeks following this talk, I could not shut up about the guy with the funny name. Many people recall now that my stuttering enthusiasm was the first time they heard of Barack Obama.

Obama’s next moment came four and a half years later, on January 3, 2008. That night was supposed to belong to Hillary Clinton as she began her inevitable march to the nomination with a routine victory in the Iowa caucuses. For a full accounting of that evening, see my report from the scene here. This was the evening that Obama reintroduced himself to America and the country. It was the night that I and many others began to envision this guy and his young family living in the finest public housing the nation has to offer.

Watch it here.

ON RACE — AND HANDLING BRUTAL POLITICAL CONTROVERSY

By March of 2008, Obama was under growing political suspicion not because of his words, but because of those uttered by his thoughtless pastor, one now forgotten Jeremiah Wright of Trinity Baptist — a huge black church in Hyde Park, Chicago.

On March 18, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Obama gave what I regard as his finest speech ever — a mature, grown up discussion of the politics of race in America. At the time, I termed the speech brilliant but doubted that it would reframe the politics of Wright’s comments.

The speech is here, with text available here.

It still strikes me as an extraordinarily wise speech and a very brave one. Most politicians would have thrown their pastor beneath the proverbial train for making stupid and politically damaging comments at the height of a tough presidential campaign. Obama was able to speak honestly and insightfully about race and to describe Wright’s perspective and his disagreements with it. He spoke to the nation as grownups — smart, factual, and able to see a variety of viewpoints. He was understanding and hopeful, not angry and he clearly understood both the profound ignorance and deep resentments that lock many people in place. It was an example not simply of a great politician, but of a thinker unafraid of complexity. A remarkable speech and easily my favorite.

ON HIS AGENDA

Obama gets elected, gives a ho-hum inaugural speech, then faces the worst economic crisis in a very long time. Credit markets freeze, banks turn inward, the Fed pumps money as hard as it can and equity markets continue their free fall. It is January and the nation realizes that we just elected a guy to manage this crisis whose total experience in the US federal government consists of four years as a very junior US Senator — half of which he spent running for president. What he lacked in experience however, he made up for in audacity.

Congress and the American people were not a hostile audience, but they were a very, very apprehensive one. I published my full reaction to the speech here, but suffice to say that listening to Obama explain his priorities to Congress, I and many others were pleased to not be listening to John McCain.

ON ISLAM

To this day, one American voter in eight believes that Obama is Muslim. Democrats are as likely to believe it as Republicans or Independents. He is, in fact, the only American president ever to live in a Muslim country — he spent part of his childhood in Indonesia. He is an acute observer of religion, so it was with real anticipation that he addressed students at the University of Cairo in Egypt. Egyptian students have a history of both scholarship and radicalism, having created via the Muslim Brotherhood the founding tenets of radical Islam.

As he had done earlier on race and would soon on war and peace, Obama spoke directly and said things that politicians usually don’t say. The title of my post on his talk, “We must say openly the things we hold in our hearts and that too often are said only behind closed doors” captures the core message of his speech, but little of its nuance. For me, this speech stands up well with the speech on race as an act of political courage. The speech is below. Transcript here.

ON WAR AND PEACE

On December 1, Obama delivered the much-anticipated results of his lengthy deliberations on Afghanistan to an audience of cadets at West Point — probably the only group unlikely to protest his conclusions. He articulates clearly, as he did in Oslo a week later, his cold war liberal, Nieburian world view and committed a second surge of 30,000 troops to the graveyard of empires in Pashtun.

It is not an easy sell. He rightly praises multilateral institutions as necessary constraints on US power and on unpleasant dictators. But the multilateral institution that Obama praised most directly, the
United Nations, has determined that a
nation may forfeit its sovereignty and suffer military and economic sanctions if it commits any of four sins: genocide, state-sponsored terrorism, invasion of
another country, and deception concerning weapons of mass destruction.
Obama plainly approves, as he should.

But Iraq in 2003 was plainly guilty of all four crimes and Afghanistan in 2009 is just as plainly not guilty of any of them. Afghanistan
did not attack the United States on 9/11, it was 19 Saudis who trained
there who did. Even if Al Qaeda is the target, we could more easily
justify war against Saudi Arabia or Pakistan than Afghanistan. As Qaeda
proxies, the Taliban are an entirely legitimate target, but rather than
pledging to wipe them from the earth, Obama yields to the reality of of
a corrupt ally in Kabul and counterinsurgency doctrine that hopes to
convert the nice ones.

This week, Obama gave another speech that will be studied for years — and will surely rate as one his most important. Once again, the circumstances of the speech were not ideal and the audience one he would not have chosen but he once more turned the occasion into an opportunity to stamp his perspective on important world events.

Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October — a prize that he surely had not sought and at some level did not welcome (although it is hard to imagine that receiving the Nobel Peace Prize creates a profound political liability). Still, the award presented the president with two challenges. Most obviously, he accepted it a week after announcing his second 30,000 troop surge in Afghanistan. This move that was opposed by most in his own party (who, like Obama himself, have yet to acknowledge that the surge in Iraq was perhaps the only truly courageous decision of George Bush’s presidency and one that, to date at least, has worked about as well as military decisions ever work).

Second, Obama plainly had not earned the prize. I have argued elsewhere that the Nobel Peace Prize is the highest award we give on the planet but it has been tarnished by a string of undeserving Americans. Giving it to Al Gore or to Obama, while not as outrageous as giving it to Henry Kissinger, is not smart. At least Obama had the grace to protest repeatedly that he was undeserving.

Political wisdom (or neutrality, for that matter) is not the strong suit of the Nobel Committee. In presenting the award, the Committee Chairman noted that

“…President
Obama said he did not feel that he deserved to be in the company of so
many transformative figures that have been honoured by this prize, and
whose courageous pursuit of peace has inspired the world. But he added
that he also knew that the Nobel Prize had not just been used to honor
specific achievements, but also to give momentum to a set of causes.
The Prize could thus represent “a call to action”.

“President Obama has understood the Norwegian Nobel Committee perfectly.”

(To take but one obviously more deserving candidate, George Mitchell must feel a bit jinxed. The former Senate Majority Leader spent a decade negotiating and helping sustain the Good Friday agreement, which has so far managed to end the war in Northern Ireland, long acclaimed as the longest and most intractable civil war on the planet. Mitchell, raised in Maine by an Irish father and Lebanese mother, is now Obama’s chief envoy to the Middle East. In his spare time, he exposed steroid use in baseball and also serves as Chairman of Disney. Unlike his boss, this guy richly deserves a Peace Prize.)

But Obama more than rose to the occasion. He gave a thoughtful, muscular, Trumanesque speech that was as strong a defense of international liberalism as I have ever heard — and I know the speeches of FDR, Kennedy, and Johnson very well. Remarkably, the talk was praised by liberals and conservatives alike (excepting a few fevered and frothing cable pundits who were off their meds, including John Bolton). Obama expounded a doctrine of just war straight out of Niebuhr and expounded usefully on the role of multilateral institutions in promoting peace. and had some smart observations about both the human condition and the need for multinational sanctions that were more painful than most of those now on offer.

Together with the speech at West Point, these speeches have been massively under reported, buried by news of health care, Copenhagen, and the holidays. This is unfortunate, because they not only offer a valuable glimpse into the thinking of the world’s most important leader, but they provide wonderful teachings to his fellow citizens of both America and the world. Concludes Brooks,

“His speeches at West Point and Oslo this year are pitch-perfect
explications of the liberal internationalist approach. Other Democrats
talk tough in a secular way, but Obama’s speeches were thoroughly
theological. He talked about the “core struggle of human nature”
between love and evil.

More than usual, he talked about the high
ideals of the human rights activists and America’s history as a vehicle
for democracy, prosperity and human rights. He talked about America’s
“strategic interest in binding ourselves to certain rules of conduct.”
Most of all, he talked about the paradox at the core of cold war
liberalism, of the need to balance “two seemingly irreconcilable
truths” — that war is both folly and necessary.

He talked about
the need to balance the moral obligation to champion freedom while not
getting swept up in self-destructive fervor.

Obama has not always gotten this balance right. He misjudged the
emotional moment when Iranians were marching in Tehran. But his
doctrine is becoming clear. The Oslo speech was the most profound of his presidency, and maybe his life.”