For a few days before the inauguration, I jokingly predicted that President Obama would begin his inaugural address, "My speechwriters and I had a beautiful speech, full of the inspiring images and profound ideas you've come to love. But I'm throwing it out, and we're going to the PowerPoint." And then, the screens would roll open all across the mall, and like a latter-day Ross Perot, jug ears and all, the president would take us step by step through the financial, energy, health, and foreign-policy crises and lay out the options for solving them.
He didn't do it. But recall that one year ago today, Obama spoke at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, perhaps the finest in that remarkable torrent of speeches that began with the Iowa Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner speech (which convinced many doubters that he had some passion in him), through the Iowa acceptance speech and the speech on race in Philadelphia. The Ebenezer speech concluded in cadences reached today only by the Rev. Joseph E. Lowery:
Brothers and sisters, we cannot walk alone.
In the struggle for peace and justice, we cannot walk alone.
In the struggle for opportunity and equality, we cannot walk alone.
In the struggle to heal this nation and repair this world, we cannot walk alone.
Those speeches of last winter and spring make up probably the most sustained, successful, and memorable verbal performance in American politics since Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Fireside Chats or perhaps since Abraham Lincoln. Having worked as a speechwriter, it was astonishing to see one man, in the midst of intense, competitive campaign activity, deliver so many superb and deeply personal speeches, something few politicians manage to do more than once or twice a year. Barack Obama is president because of those speeches, something that cannot be said of any president before him in the television age, and few before that. For months it seemed the strongest case against Obama was that his politics consisted of "just words."
Elizabeth Alexander's inaugural poem made the case for the politics of words: "We encounter each other in words, Words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed/ Words to consider, reconsider." Words, she said, create order and meaning out of noise and disorder: "Anything can be made, any sentence begun."
And yet, the president has moved on. Through the course of the campaign, his words slowly came down to earth, from inspiring and cocky to the mundane and practical. As the "gathering clouds" of the economic crisis became too dark to ignore, he accelerated his move from inspiration to work. His words no longer serve the purpose of pulling us up but of naming and giving order to the work to be done: roads, the electric grid, ending torture, restoring America's place in the world.
Obama's challenge now is to create inspiration from the work of governing itself, to do with the ideas of "duties to ourselves, our nation and the world" what Ronald Reagan did with boundless hope and individualism. In his warning of "a sapping of confidence across our land," Obama was surely aware that he echoed Jimmy Carter's "crisis of confidence," in his incorrectly named "Malaise Speech": "The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America." But where Carter failed to make a workable politics out of his call for a long, communal effort ("the truth is that the only way out is an all-out effort"), Obama builds on the inspiration and a willingness on the part of most Americans and even most members of Congress to join him in the fight. And just as he succeeded in electoral politics where other politicians of his stripe -- the "new politics" progressive and communitarian Democrats like Gary Hart or Bill Bradley -- fell short, he promises to succeed in building a politics of discipline and national commitment where Carter failed and few others have tried.
But this was a side note. The predominant theme of the speech, which from all the days preceding one would have expected to come from Lincoln and his reconnection of the country to its founding, instead came from FDR, especially his first inaugural address. I re-read a few dozen FDR inaugurals, state-of-the-unions, and Fireside Chats a few weeks ago, and what I had never understood before was how sharply and yet subtly he named his enemies and his challenges. (Sometimes not so subtly, as in the 1936 speech in which he said of the wealthy, "I welcome their hatred.") And yet, it was always in the context of defining a broad national purpose. And so today, Obama's speech was full of little barbs, little markers in the ground like, "We will restore science to its rightful place," "our power grows through its prudent use," and, "Our Founding Fathers ... drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, ... and we will not give them up for expedience's sake."
Go back a year, again; the worry about Obama was that he would never name names. John Edwards scolded him, asking him to recognize that "power never gives up without a fight." Obama was not naïve. He just had a different way of doing it. He understood, as Alexander said, that words can be "spiny or smooth." Like FDR, he names and defines the national mission, incorporates within it ideas that to many progressives sound soft and centrist -- "the stale political arguments ... no longer apply" -- and yet by the simple act of naming certain ideas as outside of the bounds of his widening circle of national mission, he defines the fight, but defines it as winnable.
The speeches are over. We'll miss them. What a joy it was to live through that period, and we can only hope that its light shines on the presidency it gave birth to.
