Obama: Return of the Great Orator?
New America Media, News Report, John Han, Posted: Mar 04, 2008
Editor’s Note: As a speaker, Barack Obama has been compared to the likes of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. But does the age of television sound bites and YouTube leave room for a great orator anymore? NAM contributor John Han tries to see where Obama fits in the tradition of America’s great orators.
Barack Obama’s message of change has been resonating with more and more voters, even converting some Republicans into Obama-cans. His victory speeches after the primaries have been downloaded thousands of times from YouTube. Some say that when it comes to speeches, he ranks right up there with John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.
“America hasn’t heard a voice like his, the cadence so thrilling and strong, since the Negro Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s,” says essayist Richard Rodriguez, author of “Days of Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican Father” and “Brown.”
“Where does his voice come from? That's what I wonder,” says Rodriguez. “He was not raised within the black American church and many of his listening years were spent overseas. And yet he has the gift that has, in generations past, ascended in America from black prayer.”
But others say it would be wrong to club Obama with the great black preachers. “Preachers understand that you’ve got to go from quiet to loud, from deep to the middle ranges of tone, from fast to slow,” says Clay Carson, professor of history at Stanford University, and director of the Martin Luther King Jr., Research and Education Institute in California. “All of these types of mixing of variety of tones which gets the audience involved in the speech because it’s not monotonic.”
In fact, says Carson, he would not even compare Obama to Dr. King. “When you examine an Obama speech, you don’t see that richness of language. The poetry is not as evident. Part of it may be that we’re not living in that kind of an age,” says Carson.
“There’s no place for oratory in modern American politics,” agrees linguist Geoffrey Nunberg. “Television killed it. The mood of the country killed it. And we just don’t trust language in that way. So I don’t think there’s any oratory left in American politics.”
“Oratory implies a very high flown, rich, metaphorical, eloquent, kind of diction,” says Nunberg, professor of linguistics at the Berkeley School of Information. “Obama’s a great speaker. I just don’t think he’s a great orator. I don’t think that’s the relevant term.”
Nunberg points to another Democrat as an example of great oratory. William Jennings Bryans’ famous “Cross of Gold” speech, delivered at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1896, juxtaposed the rich and the poor much as Obama has done. At the time, the Democratic Party wanted to shift the value of the U.S. dollar from the gold standard to silver.
At the end of his speech, Bryans said, “Having behind us the commercial interests and the laboring interests and all the toiling masses, we shall answer their demands for a gold standard by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”
More than half a century later, Martin Luther King Jr. used the same kind of swelling picturesque metaphor. “No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream,” he declaimed.
“Oratory is this kind of illustrative metaphor and words, coupled with a strong and often a fervent, emotional delivery, hands waving and all,” says Nunberg. “Obama’s speeches, by contrast, are almost plain, simple and to the point,” says Nunberg. He credits Obama’s success to characteristics more common to what he categorizes as that of great speakers rather than orators: He speaks with confidence and conviction, yet is slightly distanced from his own words, showing conservatism, and a sense of control over his emotions. That “coolness” is a kind of quality Nunberg says seems to be appealing to modern voters.
He likens the senator to former president Ronald Reagan in some ways. “There’s a same sense of being in control. When Reagan walked in a room, he had everybody’s attention and didn’t have to work for it. And that’s what Obama has, and that’s what Hillary doesn’t have.”
And that is important too, says Richard Rodriguez. Though Obama has been accused of lacking substance, Rodriguez says one of the functions of a political speech is to “stir the heart.”
“Especially in wartime, especially when the national soul is dejected,” Rodriguez says.
“He’s captured the discontent that millions of Americans feel about the political system,” agrees Stanford University’s Carson. “You have a longing for something different, and a political leader comes along and seems to provide that something different.” But he cautions that the substance of Obama’s speeches – tax cuts for the rich, Bush’s failed economic policy, global warming, NAFTA, healthcare, and poor schools – are the issues common to “any Democrat.”
He suggests, rather, that the key to the success of Obama’s speeches is that Obama focuses on bridging the gap between the partisan divide, dissolving what he calls “ideological warfare.” He says Republicans had succeeded in “demonizing the black welfare mother, and the rising crime rate which of course was the rising black crime rate.” According to Carson, these politics of fear pushed tens of millions of white Americans from the Democratic Party into the Republican camp. “The conservative revolution has kind of worn itself out,” says Carson, who notes that Bill Clinton started diffusing those negative racial stereotypes such as “the welfare queen with a Cadillac.” Now if Obama succeeds in becoming president, he says, he could do away with “slash and burn politics,” and make extreme left and right rhetoric “passé.”
But he would do well to remember that Bryans’ Cross of Gold speech may have won him the nomination and made him one of the most powerful orators of his day -- but he still didn’t win the presidency. Obama first has to win.
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