President Obama's Inaugural Address, of his major speeches to date, was regrettably very much his flattest, in the disappointed estimation of this humble blogger.
After the Boston 04 speech, his 07 announcement, the Iowa victory speech, the New Hampshire "Yes We Can" Speech, the Denver convention speech, and the Lincoln Park speeches -- all A to A+s in my estimation -- the Inaugural Address came in as a strong, serviceable, but ultimately forgettable journeyman speech. It is surely is surely the least of his canon.
Obama's failure to deliver the political lyricism that powered his political rise on THE BIG DAY was disappointment -- like being a Patriots Fan watching their team go 16-0, only to lose the Superbowl, or watching a pitcher's perfect game reduced to a mere no hitter by allowing a ninth inning walk.
Obama is much too smart, and much too good a writer, for this to have been an accident. Team Obama has in general been systematically playing down expectations over the past weeks and months -- a very smart strategy given the incomparable challenges they face at home and abroad. I'm guessing he pulled his rhetorical punches -- toned it down, even more than he did in Denver and Chicago, so as to restrain his supporters' euphoria. His words were prosaic because the work ahead is prosaic. Perhaps smart strategy -- but for lovers of politics and the poetry of great speeches, disappointing.
Yes, there were plenty of good lines. There were even plenty of soft "code" paragraphs -- the scriptural reference, the call to responsibility. But the whole was less that the sum of its parts.
Not only did Obama and White House speechwriter Jon Favreau not "bring their best stuff", to use another sporting term, they didn't even make the most of the historical echoes they invoked.
At the end of his speech, Obama invoked none other than George Washington:
At a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people:
Let it be told to the future world...that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive...that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it]."
That passage described Washington at Valley Forge (not, as Pat Buchanan and others are mistakenly reporting, prior to the surprise attack at Trenton in 1776), ordering Thomas Paine's The Crisis read to American army. The revolutionary army was out of money, the troops were not being fed, clothed, or paid -- and many were deserting -- and all were fast losing faith and hope. In short, a great historical echo for today's challenging times. But for some reason, Obama chose not to quote the opening and most famous line of Paine's essay:
These are the times that try men's soul's...
2009 is a year that will surely try Americans souls -- in ways very different from the patriots of 1776, but in ways no less real. So will 2010, and probably 2011 and 2012.
Washington knew the power of political poetry. Barack Obama has proven himself the 21st century's first virtuoso of it. I hope his Inaugural Address does not signal his turning away from the political tool that made him such a powerful force in the first place.
