Discussing Obama's Speech

by Cliopatria

Barack Obama's recent speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center,"The War We Need to Win," has provoked a lot of commentary, including Nonpartisan's"Obama, Originality, and Historical Quotes," Progressive Historians, 2 August; Manan Ahmed's"Wild Frontiers of Our Localized World," Chapati Mystery, 2 August; and Daniel Larison's"The Obama Way: Lob Missles at Mountainous Parts of Asia, Hope for the Best," Eunomia, 1 August.

I think I disagree with Ahmed's and Larison's posts, but they're very challenging. I need to think more about them. My disagreement with Nonpartisan's argument is an easier call. He claims that great speeches signifying great potential leadership do not quote earlier sources, but build their own rhetorical vision and summon us to its light. My sense is that Nonpartisan is almost exactly wrong. Great rhetoric is rarely original. If it were, it would sound alien and would alienate us. Rather, great speech rings with the familiar. That's what we mean when we say that a speech"resonates." It often gives voice to the best that we already knew. Occasionally, as in the case of Adolph Hitler, it represents the worst. But, in any case, powerful rhetoric resonates because it appeals to something that is already within us. Here are two positive examples.

Nonpartisan cites Lincoln's very brief"Gettysburg Address" as a great speech – great, in part, because it doesn't rely on quotations. If, by that, he means that its manuscript and published forms lack quotation marks, NP's correct. But Lincoln embedded the familiar in his own construction. There's not only Thomas Jefferson's"all men are created equal" at its opening, but there's also"of the people, by the people, and for the people" at its closing. Both within a 384 word speech. My friend, Ralph Keyes, points out that in the decades just before the Civil War, both the great Whig orator, Daniel Webster, and the greatest American preacher of their generation, Theodore Parker, used variations on"of the people, by the people, and for the people." If you check Gabor Boritt's Of the People, By the People, For the People and other Lincoln Quotations, you'll find his claim that the formula goes back as far as John Wycliffe's translation of the Bible in 1384:"The Bible is for the Government of the People, by the People, and for the People." (Scroll down) Great rhetoric works best when it is not innovative, but summons us to the best that is already latent in our public memory.

Nonpartisan doesn't cite the example of the greatest American public speaker of the 20th century: Martin Luther King. To have referred to King might have signaled to Nonpartisan that his argument was mistaken, because it's no longer any secret (if it ever was one) that virtually all of King's rhetoric is embedded with the familiar. That's a major reason why it resonated with his audience. If Nonpartisan doesn't recognize the embeds, it may simply be that he doesn't know King's sources very well. And not knowing is a measure of our cultural declension. I'll mention only one example of what this produces.

If you visit the Southern Poverty Law Center's Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, you'll see chiseled in its marble:"Let justice role down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream." The line is attributed in chiseled marble to"Martin Luther King." Of course, he said it. He said it many times. But he would have laughed at the attribution. He knew and his congregation knew that Martin Luther King was quoting the prophet, Amos, who lived and preached in the 8th century BCE. Commonly, when he was speaking, King did not say:"as Amos said". Any more than Abraham Lincoln said:"as Thomas Jefferson said" or"as Daniel Webster said" or"as Theodore Parker said" or"as John Wycliffe said". Very often, quotation marks are not even put around the embeds when a speech or a sermon is published. Attributions often merely get in the way of a rhetorical argument, so the conventions of public speech are simply not the same as those for academic writing. But if you believe that Martin Luther King is the original source of the words"Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream," it's because you've lost touch with a common culture with which King, Lincoln, and their audiences were intimate.

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Patrick Armen Hagopian - 8/6/2007

Hitler's first name is spelled Adolf, not Adolph, and the Civil Rights Memorial's stone is granite, not marble.

Randll Reese Besch - 8/5/2007

Ah yes,the first is from the Bible,second from Ben Franlin and last from Josef Goebbles,if I am correct.
GWBush in his warning about dissenters concerning the bogus 'War on Terror' used a varient quote from the Bible,one of the more pernicioous concerning "If you are not for God you are against God." Bush said "If you are not with us ,you are with the terrorists."
Personally I wish whom so ever would run had to write and type their own speeches,travel on a limited gov't stipend and shut down the gravytrain of benifits for the gov't aristocracy as it is now. Limited gov't should be easy to get in but hard to do instead of the well funded with their massive entourages of PR flacks,hacks and stenographers creating the speeches for them. The whole process is unreal and untrusworthy.
The candidates should write their own speeches,proofread,and to stand behind what they say. Not equivocate when they are criticized.

Ralph E. Luker - 8/5/2007

We've got one now who trusts his own judgment and thinks that we should trust it, too. He's also made decisions that aim at greatness. There simply has to be more to it than that.

Nonpartisan - 8/5/2007

Hmm. I definitely agree that greatness can be measured in what a President does not do; such greatness defined, for instance, George Washington's presidency. At the same time, though, if taken to an extreme, the idea could crown William Howard Taft the greatest President in American history! I think what we're both getting at (and correct me if I'm wrong) is that the best Presidents have excellent judgment about when and how to act and when and how not to. And that gets at my original point: I don't want a President who is so uncertain of his own judgment that he has to quote Dean Acheson or Sam Nunn in his support. I want him to trust his own judgment, so that we can trust it too.

Gareth Evans Jones - 8/5/2007

Washington's Farewell Address was not a speech.

Ralph E. Luker - 8/4/2007

For starters, Mr. Nichols, I recommend that you look at Ralph Keyes, _"Nice Guys Finish Seventh" False Phrases, Spurious Sayings, and Familiar Misquotations_ (NY: HarperCollins, 1992), pp. 51-55. I'd quote you the whole section, but it is too long. Let's just say that there's a lineage to such Churchillisms as "blood, sweat, and tears", "democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time", "iron curtain", etc.

Ralph E. Luker - 8/4/2007

NP, You claim both that quoting a former office holder lower than President is an attempt to draw him (or her) within one's orbit and that quoting a former President is an acknowledgement that the candidate can't hope to be a better President. I don't think either of those things is true. If the latter were true, quoting JFK would be a disasterous admission. He was a much better speaker than he was a President. But I'm also concerned about your final statement that the American people want "someone who is fully prepared to be the greatest President this country has ever seen." The problem with that claim is that we no longer have any sense that "greatness" can also be measured by what a President does _not_ do. So the powers of the presidential office are stretched and expanded far beyond constitutional mandate in the reach for "greatness." I'm looking for something more modest -- like living by the oath of office to uphold the Constitution of the United States.

John Nicholas - 8/4/2007

I like your use of the familiar with Lincoln and King. Can you expand this with those speeches of WWII British Prime Minister Churchill?

John Nicholas

William Mandel - 8/4/2007

In total immodesty, my testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1960 and my earlier testimony in 1953 before the Senate's McCarthy Committee have had, with no effort on my part, the kind of life (54 years thus far in the latter case) that make them candidates for the Great Speech category.
A German film team came here this past summer to "shoot" me for a documentary on McCarthyism based on that testimony, which they had discovered in the course of their research. They were total strangers and I did not know of their project. McCarthy drank himself to death within a year after I destroyed him by taking fullest advantage of his decision to conduct his interrogation of me live on national television. It had a huge audience because his wild attempt to take over the government by Senatorial investigation was the news of the day.
You may be interessted in my opening line, ad libbed as was the entire thing, as an example of rhetoric:
"Honorable beaters of children,* distinguished Dixiecrat wearing the clothing of a gentleman, eminent Republican who refuses an accomodation with the one country with which we must live in peace if we and our children are to survive,..."
*the police had just clubbed students massed on the staircase of San Francisco's City Hall, where the hearings were held.

Nonpartisan - 8/3/2007

I believe you're somewhat misinterpreting my post, though that may be my fault for not being clear enough. I'm not trying to argue that politicians shouldn't use familiar rhetoric that resonates with their listeners; rather, my objection is that they shouldn't seek the approval of historical figures to whom they should be roughly equal or even master. When a politician quotes by name an earlier politician, such as Edwards quoting Dean Acheson, he's consciously or unconsciously trying to bring Acheson into his column; similarly, when he names or quotes a living leader, such as Obama citing Sam Nunn in support of his foreign policy, he's appealing to that leader for ideological support. That, I think, is unbecoming in someone who wants to become President of the United States; in order to earn our confidence, he should have enough confidence in himself that he does not need to align himself with historical figures who occupied offices lower than, or even equal to, the one he is seeking.

Given that argument, the fact that Lincoln didn't cite his sources in the Gettysburg Address, or that Howard Dean didn't mention Paul Wellstone when he cribbed his biggest applause line in the 2003 Winter Meeting speech, is extremely significant. And while you're correct that I neglected to discuss Martin Luther King, mostly because of my focus on Presidents, I think King's speeches bolster, rather than discredit, my point. I don't presume to have anywhere close to a thorough knowledge of King (and I know who I'm talking to!), but I do know that, as a minister, he laced his speeches with much more Biblical rhetoric than did other speakers of his time. But quoting the Bible is not the same thing as quoting a historical political figure. God and the other figures mentioned in the Bible are supposed to be above any mere mortal; quoting them, seeking their approval, is a sign of appropriate humility in a Presidential candidate. The same cannot be said for a politician who quotes old Secretaries of State or even former Presidents. I don't think the American people want a President who comes into the office thinking he can't ever be as good a President as John Kennedy -- which is what quoting JFK implies. They want someone who is fully prepared to be the greatest President this country has ever seen, even though he probably won't be.