Great rhetoric is, obviously, great.
Nobody should want their presidential candidate to be uninspiring and poor with a teleprompter. Sadly, both John McCain and Hillary Clinton are bad speakers and that is, on the whole, a reason to dread four years of hearing one say “my friends” too often while grimacing and the other burst into weird laughter for no reason.
Obama is a great speaker with a prepared text and adequate (though no match for Bill Clinton) without one. That is, I repeat, to be applauded and not attacked.
However, one need not be Spiderman’s guardian to know that with great powers come great responsibility. Even Plato knew that the power to move masses of people could be dangerous.
Worries about Obama and rhetoric often meet the retort that Ronald Reagan also used high flown rhetoric. He too had legions of over-devoted fans who thought he could do no wrong. If Reagan raised taxes, these devotees intoned there must have been a good reason for it.
There is, however, a critical difference between Reagan and Obama and the purpose to which they turned their rhetorical skills. Great rhetoric is safest when turned to great causes. It is most dangerous, and cloying, when serving smaller political goals that conflate party triumph with national renewal.
Winston Churchill found a place for his grand Edwardian speech making in the war against fascism and communism. When he used his grand powers for year-to-year politics, it was more than a bit absurd and even a little dangerous. Churchill always wobbled toward the belief that Britain depended on electing him or at least his party (which ever it was at the time) for salvation. All was well rhetorically when Britain did depend on him, at least a bit, for deliverance from evil.
Martin Luther King is another fine example of a moment meeting a great man. Segregation was a great cancer and the racism of the sixties a cause that demanded the high words of King. He was fighting obvious evil and using his mind and power to rally all of America to a cause greater than self. When the greatest victories were won, there was no diminishing of his speaking ability or of King’s great intelligence, but the evils more subtle and the solutions more questionable. His heroic life was cut tragically short, but before his great rhetoric could find a cause worthy of it.
Moment met man in Churchill in the 1930’s and 1940’s and in King in the 1960’s. Both made great speeches on other topics, but their high calling was to make a great evil impossible for Western men and women to embrace in public.
Jesse Jackson in his prime was at least the equal of Barack Obama as a speech maker. The difference between King and Jackson, more than anything else, was that Jackson had no obvious cause to which to turn his rhetoric. Racism still exists, of course, but its manifestations are more subtle and solutions less obvious. People of good will, non-racists all, can disagree about what to do about it.
Grand and great rhetoric tied to party politics debases the rhetoric and lacks staying power. When not tied to a cause greater than party triumph, it is dangerous.
This is even more true when it takes on gassy causes in politics like “unity” or “making America great again” or “moral goodness” not tied to any great struggle in which legitimate opposition exists in the body politic.
There is nothing wrong with a great speech that reminds us of the things we all agree about, but great danger in associating these things with one party or person.
Outside of elections there is great good and moral up lift in the non-political Fourth of July speech where everyone, Democrat and Republican, sits together agreeing about what we all agree about.
In 2008 one of those things is the evil of segregation, thanks to Reverend King’s actions and rhetoric. We can also enjoy, and should enjoy, the platitudinous denunciation of fascism thanks to Winnie and communism thanks to Nancy’s Ronnie!
Of course, one might argue that patriotism is good (everyone nods), but then argue that patriotism demands gay rights laws (Republicans growl) or pro-life policies (Democrats growl). The vaguer stuff (truth, goodness, and the American way) is used to get the hard and debate begins with this reminder of what unites us.
That is good stuff since it uses high rhetoric to try to win what the speaker perceives is a great victory even if the speaker is wrong about the great cause!
Reagan was rhetorically motivated, more than anything else, to defeat communism. He knew men tortured in the camps in Russia which the American left often ignored. He was opposed, to the death, to a system which killed tens of millions of people globally. He breathed his hatred of Stalinism. His rhetoric was directed to this end in almost every speech.
Agree or disagree that he “won the Cold War,” but he plainly wanted to win it and in the 1970’s not everyone in American politics did. Ford though such talk dangerous and Carter thought it lunatic. Reagan used all his skills to do it.
This brings us to Obama.
Exactly what over-arching end is Obama’s rhetric pointed toward?
Unity?
Being proud of America again?
Reagan hit those notes too . . . but anti-communism was the glue that held his coalition together from Falwell to extreme libertarians. It was his Cause and it was not vague stuff that nobody could disagree with.
The danger of the Fourth of July language not tied to a Great Cause is it risks making the merely patriotic personal. Are we really doing a great thing merely by voting for Obama?
Is turning Bush out of office, a man who will be gone regardless of who wins the next election, really a great cause like defeating the butchers who murdered millions in Russia, Poland, Cambodia, and Africa?
Is securing the right to partial birth abortion that cause?
What good cause holds most of Obama’s voters together that is not the politics of the personal? Even ending the War in Iraq is not an adequate cause, since ending a War, if one does not mind failing to win it, is pretty easy. Losing is, after all, not the work of a greatest generation.
The specific policy proposals to which Obama ties his rhetoric are same-old left-of-center Democrat stuff. Only the most partisan believes failure to pass them imperils the Republic.
Equally absurd (though more tempting) is that the idea of electing Obama will end racism. Voting for Obama as a token, if fact, would be a bad sign. There is good, even great good, in breaking down barriers to advancement and only a fool would oppose it.
But it is at least unseemly for the candidate to run on it as if a vote for Obama is, by itself redemptive. King, Churchill, and Reagan may have asked us to do things, even things that benefited them, but their followers knew the battle they were fighting and their foes.
To his credit, Obama does not demonize religious conservatives or political conservatives . . . at least yet. He talks only the populism of positive thinking, but most of it is stuff with which no fair minded American disagrees . . . just like a Reagan speech with this exception: Reagan would use the rhetoric to encourage us to win the Cold War while Obama seems only to want to win an election in 2008.
Obama still has a chance to spell out the foe he is fighting and the battle he wants to win. Incremental changes in government programs and tax policy don’t justify all the purple prose. He sounds like he wants to save us . . . from what?
John McCain, if he had Obama’s gift, could claim global jihad. Right or wrong such a cause would justify big talk.
What will Obama say? If he does not tell us his cause, which means excluding somebody by pointing out what he wishes to change as King excluded the segregationists and Reagan the fellow travelers, then the fears will grow that at best he is a wind bag and at worst a demagogue.
We all like Obama too much to hope either is true. He has a chance, having roused us, to do something. If he does not tell us before the election, then he will have a mandate to be president, but not to act as president. His first partisan steps will be deflating . . . and like Jimmy Carter he will fail in his great promise.
Call me a cynic, but I don’t think my candidate, any candidate, not even a Churchill, a King, or a Reagan matters that much. What does matter is what they will do . . . and I am afraid of rhetoric that makes me want to follow Obama only knows where.