As is the case with all candidates who have to mature into an elected official (and then back down to childlike shenanigans come election year), their speeches evolve. Actually, they really don’t evolve, or devolve, at all. They become much more perfunctory. Instead of railing on the current administration or firing up their arenas full of supporters, they are making pithy comments before they sign the newest asbestos bill, or detailing their plan to reduce Homeland Security’s budget for staples.
OK, it isn’t that bad. But their speeches are forced to become less salesy and more managerially. Obama is no different. Compare his speech at the Jefferson Jackson dinner he gave back in November of 2007 with any he has given while as president.
Compared to:
Not as sexy, is it?
Charlotte Higgins from the Guardian wrote a piece back during the good ol’ election days. Charlotte argues that Obama’s speeches are comparable to those given by, of all times and places, politicians in ancient Greece. His rhythm, oratorical tricks, even the intellectually elevated, and out of norm, content he pitches to us poor dumb folk are all more Cicero than Clinton.
It is not just in the intricacies of speechifying that Obama recalls Cicero. Like Cicero, Obama is a lawyer. Like Cicero, Obama is a writer of enormous accomplishment – Dreams From My Father, Obama’s first book, will surely enter the American literary canon. Like Cicero, Obama is a “novus homo” – the Latin phrase means “new man” in the sense of self-made. Like Cicero, Obama entered politics without family backing (compare Clinton) or a military record (compare John McCain). Roman tradition dictated you had both. The compensatory talent Obama shares with Cicero, says Catherine Steel, professor of classics at the University of Glasgow, is a skill at “setting up a genealogy of forebears – not biological forebears but intellectual forebears. For Cicero it was Licinius Crassus, Scipio Aemilianus and Cato the Elder. For Obama it is Lincoln, Roosevelt and King.”
The article notes his love for the tricolon (repeating a term or an idea three or more times within a sentence or a string of sentences: “I came, I saw, I conquered”), antonomasia (referring to something by not naming it: “I heard this guy back in the day had a beard, wore sandals, made wine on the spot, and the chicks loved him”), and tripartite ideal (pathos, logos, and ethos). After Googling all those terms I concluded that they are indeed oratorical terms and not diseases you might contract while traveling to the Amazon. Obama is employing old tricks–very old tricks.
Obama, like Cicero, is a “new man.” They both lacked a rich family or a military background when they entered politics. To make up for this they bought a very big car. No, I am kidding, they used their speeches to boost their appeal. But for Cicero, as I am sure for Obama, speeches were not just words but knowledge and character represented by words:
Cicero was well aware of the problem. In his book On The Orator, he argues that real eloquence can be acquired only if the speaker has attained the highest state of knowledge – “otherwise what he says is just an empty and ridiculous swirl of verbiage”. The true orator is one whose practice of citizenship embodies a civic ideal – whose rhetoric, far from empty, is the deliberate, rational, careful organiser of ideas and argument that propels the state forward safely and wisely.
Obama is definitely not done with Candidate Obama. He’s already used his honed campaign skills while pitching the stimulus package, and will do so again when pitching his healthcare reform and for sure in 2011 when re-election is politely tapping on the door. Right now he is just storing all the good stuff for the next big show.
Charlotte Higgins: Obama is to Cicero like Cheney is to -Blank-
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