While the last three paragraphs are crap, I agreewith everything Gideon Rachman has to say in his column this week.
Even his most bitter opponents grant Barack Obama one thing – he makes great speeches. The senator from Illinois is generally held to be a competent debater and an electrifying orator.The notion that Mr Obama is the new Demosthenes has even made it across the Atlantic. On BBC radio the other day, there was a long discussion of the art of rhetoric, illustrated with clips of the best of Barack. William Rees-Mogg, a venerable former editor of The Times, asserts that Mr Obama is the most inspirational presidential candidate since John F. Kennedy and that “he is, in my view, a better speaker than Kennedy”.
All this leaves me baffled. I have watched Mr Obama speak live; I have watched him speak on television; I have even watched his speeches set to music on a video made by celebrity supporters. But I find myself strangely unmoved – and this is disconcerting. It feels like admitting to falling asleep during Winston Churchill’s “fight them on the beaches” speech.
I will admit one thing. Mr Obama has a nice, gravelly voice – which is perhaps a legacy of his days as a heavy smoker. But his most famous phrases are vacuous. The “audacity of hope”? It would be genuinely audacious to run for the White House on a platform of despair. Promising hope is simply good sense. “The fierce urgency of now”? It is hard to see what Mr Obama means when he says this – other than that some inner voice has told him to run for president.
{...}And then there is “Yes we can” – the phrase that was so inspirational that it inspired Will.i.am of hip-hop group the Black Eyed Peas to make his infamous video, backed up by film stars and musicians such as Scarlett Johansson and Herbie Hancock.
The strumming of guitars and crooning drowns out Mr Obama on the musical version. So I had to consult the text to find out what exactly it is that we can do. “Yes we can to justice and equality. Yes we can to opportunity and prosperity. Yes we can heal this nation. Yes we can repair this world. Yes we can.”
This sounds to me like a man doing an impression of what he thinks a great speech might be like. It is the kind of empty exhortation that usually gives politicians a bad name. Peter Sellers, a British comedian of the 1960s, caught the genre nicely in a parody speech: “Let us assume a bold thrust and go forward together. Let us carry the fight against ignorance to the four corners of the earth, because it is a fight that concerns us all.” Mr Obama might easily give a speech like that – although he would probably strip out some of the detail.
{...}And while Mr Obama’s most “inspirational” phrases are vague to the point of vacuity, he has shown in a series of television debates that he is more than capable of serious discussion. You do not get to be president of the Harvard Law Review if you cannot cope with detail.
So Mr Obama is not relying on empty exhortation because that is all he is capable of. It is a deliberate political strategy. And it makes sense. The more a candidate gets stuck into the detail, the more likely he is to bore or antagonise voters. Appealing to people’s emotions is less dangerous and more effective.{...}
Hits it right on the head (before Rachman subsequently goes off the rails entirely, saying, in essence, that just because Obama's speeches are empty and vacuous, he wouldn't be as president.)
See, here's the thing. I can't stand Obama any more than I can stand Bubba Clinton. They're both con men. They're both slimy. All you need to do is watch them on tee vee for thirty seconds or so and you get the overpowering whiff of used car salesmen. Now, while I'm fairly certain Bubba would have been selling used Pintos, and Obama "pre-owned" Lexus' (Lexii?), they're both cut of the same cloth. They are salesmen, and they both damn well know it. Obama is selling a dream of an America where everyone can, really and truly, get along; where no one will have any partisan leanings after he's elected president; where everyone will unite hands and sing Kumbaya at sunset every day, across all the time zones of this country. Do you really think he's going to be able to deliver it?
Moreover, how dumb are you if you think he can actually do it?
Posted by Kathy at February 26, 2008 06:20 PM | TrackBack