Heilemann: Obama’s Spare Inaugural Rhetoric Signals Strategic Mastery
John Heilemann
New York Magazine
1/21/09 at 12:07 AM
Barack Obama’s election against daunting odds was a testament to many things, but not least his remarkable capacity to rock the mike. On Tuesday, he delivered the most watched, most anticipated, most historically significant speech of his life in front of a crowd so massive and so joyous that it took your breath away. Immediately beforehand came the swearing-in, which was a sublime thing, engendering even in his critics and partisan adversaries a feeling of national pride — and providing his fans with a rush of satisfaction and and jolt of pure exhilaration.
Yet the speech that followed was less than thrilling in itself, perhaps by design. Its structure was formal, classical, the substance largely abstract. There were no anecdotes or narratives, personal or otherwise. There were few rhetorical flourishes, no gratuitous bids for Barletts. The language was spare, at times even pedestrian — telling Americans that "we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America," for example.
And though the speech was by no means pessimistic, its optimism was balanced by a cold-eyed realism — and plenty of hard talk about not taking short cuts, a crisis brought on by greed and irresponsibility, and a collective failure to make hard choices. The political purpose of all this is easy enough to see: Obama is preparing the country for tough trade-offs down the line. (And if he's serious about reforming entitlements, you can certainly see the logic of laying down that predicate.) But it's certainly not the kind of language that caused so many hearts to flutter during his campaign.
More familiar to them will have been Obama's focus on another set of choices: the false ones that have gripped our politics lo these many years. He listed three: between whether "government is too big or too small"; between whether "the market is a force for good or ill"; between "our safety and our ideals." Obama's contention that these "stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply" is not surprising. It's at the core of his attempt to define himself as an apostle of pragmatism, to transcend the hoary partisan and ideological divisions that he's long cited as central to the dysfunction of Washington.
(More here.)
New York Magazine
1/21/09 at 12:07 AM
Barack Obama’s election against daunting odds was a testament to many things, but not least his remarkable capacity to rock the mike. On Tuesday, he delivered the most watched, most anticipated, most historically significant speech of his life in front of a crowd so massive and so joyous that it took your breath away. Immediately beforehand came the swearing-in, which was a sublime thing, engendering even in his critics and partisan adversaries a feeling of national pride — and providing his fans with a rush of satisfaction and and jolt of pure exhilaration.
Yet the speech that followed was less than thrilling in itself, perhaps by design. Its structure was formal, classical, the substance largely abstract. There were no anecdotes or narratives, personal or otherwise. There were few rhetorical flourishes, no gratuitous bids for Barletts. The language was spare, at times even pedestrian — telling Americans that "we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America," for example.
And though the speech was by no means pessimistic, its optimism was balanced by a cold-eyed realism — and plenty of hard talk about not taking short cuts, a crisis brought on by greed and irresponsibility, and a collective failure to make hard choices. The political purpose of all this is easy enough to see: Obama is preparing the country for tough trade-offs down the line. (And if he's serious about reforming entitlements, you can certainly see the logic of laying down that predicate.) But it's certainly not the kind of language that caused so many hearts to flutter during his campaign.
More familiar to them will have been Obama's focus on another set of choices: the false ones that have gripped our politics lo these many years. He listed three: between whether "government is too big or too small"; between whether "the market is a force for good or ill"; between "our safety and our ideals." Obama's contention that these "stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply" is not surprising. It's at the core of his attempt to define himself as an apostle of pragmatism, to transcend the hoary partisan and ideological divisions that he's long cited as central to the dysfunction of Washington.
(More here.)
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