Obama's oratory

There's a wonderful article on Obama's oratory this week in, of all places, the Financial Times. My own professional career involved thousands of hours behind lecterns, but for me the goal as a bioscience lecturer was clarity and conciseness rather than the "high oratory" of politicians and clergypersons. Nevertheless I've always been intrigued by oratorical techniques. This article delineates the ones Obama uses, with specific examples. Because newspaper articles often have a short cyberlifespan you should read it soon if you are interested; here are a few excerpts.

As lawyer, lecturer and politician, Obama’s “certain talent for rhetoric” has been what propelled his rise. And his speeches are filled, thrillingly, with highly formal rhetoric of the sort that would be recognisable to ancient philosophers... He absolutely pours it on. What Obama’s doing is as old as Aristotle – whose Rhetoric set out the ground rules for the art of persuasion four centuries before the birth of Christ…

Take the “tricolon”, for example – three terms in ascending order such as “I came, I saw, I conquered”; or… Lincoln’s second inaugural with its line “with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right ... ” This is perhaps the most famous rhetorical figure, other than the so-called “rhetorical question”, and Obama, like most politicians, is addicted to it.

Indeed, he often builds his tricolons out of the balanced doubles known in formal rhetoric as syntheton (“men and women”, “colour and creed”, “young and old”... Last July, in Berlin… he said: “As we speak, cars in Boston and factories in Beijing are melting the ice-caps in the Arctic, shrinking coastlines in the Atlantic, and bringing drought to farms from Kansas to Kenya.”

A double (“Boston” and “Beijing”), leading to a tricolon whose third term is itself doubled up, the whole mixture thick with alliteration. This is very far from informal or direct or off-the-cuff speech. It is marvellously and intentionally musical…

Obama’s winning slogan, “Yes we can,” draws much of its strength from its three stressed syllables. It is a metrical object called a molossus – thump, thump, thump; as in Tennyson’s “Break, break, break” or Seamus Heaney’s “squat pen rests”. You could, arguably, scan it as an anapaest (diddy dum) but our boy certainly doesn’t. The official transcript of his speech at the New Hampshire primary punctuates it thus: “Yes. We. Can.”

Repetition, particularly in the form of anaphora – where a phrase is repeated at the beginning of successive lines – is another of the prime tools of political oratory and one that Obama revels in. His speech at the Iowa caucus… opened: “You know, they said this time would never come. They said our sights were set too high. They said this country was too divided, too disillusioned to ever come together around a common purpose.”

He went on to declare: “I’ll be a president who finally makes healthcare affordable ... I’ll be a president who ends the tax breaks ... I’ll be a president who harnesses the ingenuity ... I’ll be a president who ends this war in Iraq ... ” Then: “This was the moment when ... this was the moment when ... this was the moment when ... ” And, as his speech built to its climax, “Hope is what I saw ... Hope is what I heard ... Hope is what led a band of colonists to rise up against an empire.”

To an American literate in his own country’s history, Obama’s rolling repetitions will bring consciously or unconsciously to mind the Declaration of Independence. The run of charges against King George in that document rolls out in an unstoppable anaphoric fugue. “He has refused ... He has forbidden ... He has refused ... He has called together ... He has dissolved ... He has refused ... ”

During the election campaign, various Republican outriders publicly sneered at Obama for precisely his facility as a speaker. The former Republican senator Rick Santorum called him “a person of words”, and political activist Phyllis Schlafly dubbed him “an elitist who worked with words”…Formal oratory, as the fiercely well-educated president-elect knows, was the foundation stone of American democracy. And unless I miss my guess, we’re going to see quite something at his inauguration.

One other relevant observation re his communication skills:

Every few minutes, our conversation was interrupted by passersby congratulating Obama on his primary victory. The people who stopped to shake his hand were black and white, old and young, professors and car mechanics. Some Obama obviously knew. Others seemed to be strangers. He was affable with everyone, smiling warmly, but in exchanges that lasted more than a few seconds it was possible to see him slipping subtly into the idiom of his interlocutor—the blushing, polysyllabic grad student, the hefty black church-pillar lady, the hip-hop autoshop guy. Black activists sometimes say that African-American kids need to become “bi-dialectic”—to speak both black English and standard English—to succeed. Obama, the biracial kid from Hawaii, speaks a full range of American vernaculars.