In these past few days, I have read and heard many responses to President Obama’s speech at the memorial service at the University of Arizona, including that of Jeff Goldfarb here at Deliberately Considered. While I agree with many of the encomiums to that speech – praise for its sincerity, civility, appeal to democracy, appreciation for individual lives – I am in a distinct minority in feeling that it was not altogether successful as a moment of high and consequential political rhetoric.

It was not the Gettysburg Address. Of course, it may seem unkind to compare Obama’s speech to that one of the ages by Lincoln, but I believe the tasks of that speech were similar to those of Lincoln and that it fell short of the mark. Public ceremonies of this type have unique challenges – memorialize the victims of violence, appeal to the better angels of the nation, re-establish the authority of the state, indicate a way forward.

The main issues involve choices of genre and structure. For me, Obama’s speech oscillated without adequate accounting or warning between the genres of private lamentation, religious homily, and political oration. Without an overarching structure that linked these genres together, their coming and going unsettled me as a listener. Was so much reference to scripture appropriate in a civil ceremony? Was so much detail about individual personalities befitting a national oration by a head of state?

The speech caused me to reflect on prior moments of national traumas that challenged leaders to make sense through collective reckoning. Traumas like wars and assassinations that resonate upwards, from individuals through families and communities, to the larger social and political collectivity call forth formal responses by heads of state. And these responses transform the traumas into history. Hegel linked history itself to the state: “It is the State [he wrote] which first presents a subject-matter that is not only adapted to the prose of History, but involves the production of such History in the very progress of its own being.”   The state thus views itself as the central character of history, with an agency and a political body of its own, capable of being wounded.  The lives of individuals, whether caught up as soldiers in war, or as workers in a ruptured economy, or as victims of terrorist attacks, find themselves and their individual points of view eclipsed by that of the state itself. And this is true regardless of how central to the state’s very progress these individuals are.

The speech by President Obama last Wednesday night made me reflect specifically on Lincoln’s magnificent “Remarks” at the ceremonies dedicating the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.  In his brilliant analysis of The Gettysburg Address, Garry Wills writes of Abraham Lincoln’s adaptation of the Greek Epitaphios or Funeral Oration to the task of dedicating a military cemetery on the site of the former American Civil War battlefield at Gettysburg.  Of this classical template, Wills writes that it provided a “prose form of the Greek orations that was meant to be bracing after the sung lament (threnos) of the burial rite…The prose form is itself a return to political life, a transition from family mourning to the larger community’s sense of purpose.”  Lincoln built his speech up from a series of oppositions – life and death, word and deed, nature and society – and managed to extol the individual soldiers and their deeds without naming or describing them. And he ends with the transcendent frame of “the government of the people shall not perish from the earth.”

From sung lamentation to prosodic oratory, the State claims its transcendent purview. The State thus has its genres and can, at moments like that at Gettysburg, deploy them effectively. But we need to assess other historical moments of crisis, like that of the last weeks after the shootings in Tucson, in which the line between the purview and prerogatives of the state and those of individuals and families is not so clear cut, when the “right” genre for representing historical events does not so easily present itself, and when the confusion is largely a function of discord over the meaning of an event in real time.

The task then becomes doubly difficult – to fashion a language of interpretation that moves to that collective level of history but that also takes seriously the work of threnos (lamentation).  Greek tragedy, another genre, found that middle way, largely because the families whose actions were performed were literally the families heading the state. And tragedies like Antigone were especially tuned to this combining, focusing on the conflicting demands of family and state. But the language of “family” can be expansive or restrictive as given society chooses to interpret it.  Bifurcating the prerogatives of the private sphere and those of the public sphere can ultimately entail a loss of sympathy and collegiality in the most expansive meaning of the terms, that is in terms Hannah Arendt would put forward. Rather, it is possible to highlight the trajectory from threnos (lamentations of the family) to epitaphios (funerary oration) that carries forward the apprehension of the singularity of the one who is missing or mourned even in a genre that expresses the needs of the collectivity. I believe that this was Obama’s aim, and why he spent considerable time reflecting on the details of the lives of the individuals killed in Tucson. For many listeners, Obama’s speech hit the mark, moving them emotionally and drawing them together collectively. With the Gettysburg Address in the back of my mind, I found myself wanting more.

Barack Obama is the foremost orator in my life time. During the Presidential campaign, I thought that this may be the case. The first two years of his Presidency raised some doubts. I knew the talent was there, but would the talent be used effectively to enable him to be the great President that I thought he could and hoped he would be? But after his speech at the Memorial Service for the Victims of the Shooting in Tucson, Arizona, I have no doubt. No other public figure could have accomplished what I think President Obama accomplished last night.

He spoke as the head of state, not as a partisan candidate or leader, and a deeply divided country became, at least momentarily, united in response to his beautifully crafted and delivered address. He enabled us to grieve together, helped us try to make sense together, and challenged us to respectfully act together, despite our differences.

The power of the speech was revealed by the reaction to it. Even Glenn Beck recognized Obama’s accomplishment, and publicly thanked the President for giving the best speech of his career.   And the instant analysis of the panel at Fox News praised the excellence and effectiveness of the President’s inspirational address.   Charles Krauthammer concluded the discussion, recognizing that the President appeared and spoke as the head of state, not as an ideological politician, and maintained that it may have a significant effect on Obama’s fortunes. “I am not sure it’s going to have a trivial effect on the way he is perceived.” This from one of Obama’s major critics.

Of course Obama’s supporters, including most of the people attending the service in Tucson at the vast McKale Memorial Center at the University of Arizona, were deeply moved. My friends and I at the Theodore Young Community Center were especially pleased that our guy did so well.

And the commentators of the major newspapers and blogs were almost universally in agreement of the speeches inventiveness and excellence. Dionne, Robinson, Thiessen , Gerson at the Washington Post , Collins and the Times editorial voice at The New York Times , John Dickerson at Slate , John Guardiano at FrumForum, and, in a most interesting acknowledgement of the rarity of Obama’s achievement, Rick Brookhiser at the National Review.

Obama is probably the only major politician who became a national figure because of one speech, his 2004 keynote address to the Democratic National Convention.

When his campaign for the Presidency was most severely challenged by the politics of race surrounding his relationship with his minister Reverend Jeremiah Wright Jr., he gave the most important speech on the problem of race given by a candidate for the Presidency, as I analyzed in a previous post.

Now he has given a remarkable speech that marked a solemn occasion, by remembering with specificity those who died, those who survived and those who acted heroically. And then he addressed the political divisions in the country, most recently concerning whether the heated hateful rhetoric (much of it directed at the policies and person of Obama) has contributed to the tragedy . He did this in a way that made his most principled point for civility, uniting his divided audience:

“But at a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized -– at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who happen to think differently than we do -– it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we’re talking with each other in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds. (Applause.)…

For the truth is none of us can know exactly what triggered this vicious attack. None of us can know with any certainty what might have stopped these shots from being fired, or what thoughts lurked in the inner recesses of a violent man’s mind. Yes, we have to examine all the facts behind this tragedy. We cannot and will not be passive in the face of such violence. We should be willing to challenge old assumptions in order to lessen the prospects of such violence in the future. (Applause.) But what we cannot do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on each other. (Applause.) That we cannot do. (Applause.) That we cannot do.”(link)

In the days immediately following the Tucson Massacre, the divide was between those who argued that the violence of political rhetoric, specifically of the right, was somehow related to the Tucson massacre, and those who argued that this was unfounded and divisive at best, a blood libel, as Sarah Palin unfortunately put it.  The response to a national tragedy was an even more divided nation. Obama turned the table.

He agreed with Palin, et.al., that we will likely never know what motivated Jared Lee Loughner and that the nature of our political discourse was not likely an immediate cause, but he disagreed with the Palin (who repeatedly reminded her audience during the Presidential campaign that Barack Hussein Obama palled around with terrorists) about what the proper nature of political discourse should be. He struck a blow in favor of civility.  His speech  makes incivility more than unpleasant.  It is less likely now to yield practical results. He marked a standard for future action that all Americans applauded, and this will have consequences. I agree with Charles Krauthammer: it’s not going to have a trivial effect.

Now it will be interesting to see how the Republicans advance the ‘‘Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act.’’ Perhaps they will have the decency to at least change the name of this meaningless gesture.

It was in his “Race Speech,” delivered in Philadelphia on March 18, 2008, that Barack Obama addressed the most serious challenge of his run for the Presidency. In Philadelphia tactics and overall political vision were brought together. The vision was used to serve a pressing necessity.

The situation was grave. The project of his campaign was being challenged by the politics of race, which was perhaps inevitable given the deep legacies of slavery and racism in America. The immediate controversy was a video compiled from sermons given by his minister, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Wright seemed to embody black resentment and anger. If this was Obama’s minister, how could whites be sure that Wright did not say what Obama thought? Why did he stay in Wright’s church? Who is Barack Obama really? In order to have a chance to win the primaries, let alone the general election, Obama had to address such questions. Obama’s campaign advisors counseled a tactical response. Obama overruled their advice and addressed the issue of race head on, choosing to continue telling his story and make explicit that he was proposing, to expand the promise of the American Dream by addressing the legacies of the American dilemma. From the standard partisan point of view, this was dangerous. There was the very real danger that Obama could become identified as a symbolic black candidate.

The setting was formal. He spoke in Philadelphia, across the street from Constitution Hall, from a podium, flanked by 8 American flags. His tone was somber. His immediate audience was subdued. This was far from a campaign rally, far from a speech to a nominating convention. He opened with a reflection upon the promise and limitations of the constitution and the history of racism and anti-racism in America. Slavery is enshrined in the Constitution, but so is its critique. He pointed to the problem and identified his political project with the ongoing solution:

And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part – through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk – to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.

This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign – to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together – unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction – towards a better future for our children and our grandchildren.

This belief comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. But it also comes from my own American story.

And he identified the struggle with his personal story, linking his story with the broad appeal of the American dream:

I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners – an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.

With this in mind, he addressed the then recent controversies surrounding  Wright, distancing himself from hateful words, identifying with African American experience. He expressed his ambivalence about Wright and about the complexities of white and black prejudices and sensitivities. He received his first applause fifteen minutes into his speech. If we don’t confront the legacies of racism and suspicion, we won’t address the pressing problems of our day. “And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.”

He compared and empathized with the anger and concerns of blacks and whites, who have in common that their dreams are slipping away. He drew upon his bi-racial experiences to show how closely he feels the pains of whites and blacks as they have confronted each other, often without good reasons. Whites have viewed opportunity as a zero sum game, therefore, turning against busing and affirmative action. The mistake of Wright is that he spoke of American society as if it were static. He does not appreciate the change, represented by Obama candidacy. America can change. That is the true genius of this nation. The challenge is to be cognizant of how race builds resentments, but also to overcome them and address the real problems. In this speech, Obama most clearly formulated his as a project of reinventing a political culture in order to address pressing political problems.

At first the power of the speech was so overwhelming that most called it what it was: the most extraordinary speech given by a Presidential candidate, and now by a man who has become President, on the central problem in American political culture. But this deep meaning of his speech was soon lost. The commentary came to focus on whether he had successfully defused the Wright issue. The most cynical responses were those that denounced his equation of his good white grandmother with his hate filled preacher. Still it was understood as a turning point. He spoke about race in a way that reasonable people recognized was extraordinary. He was able to say things that have not been “say-able.” He turned his lowest point in the campaign to his great advantage. This was the substantive and performative highpoint of Obama’s candidacy.

There was an interesting article in The New York Times last Sunday about a poetry salon in Damascus, Syria.  It reminded me of the theater movement I studied in Poland in the 1970s.  Both the theater movement and the poetry salon are examples of constituted free zones in repressive societies.  I think they demonstrate the possibility of re-inventing political culture, the possibility of reformulating the relationship between the culture of power and the power of culture.

The secret police are present at Bayt al-Qasid, the House of Poetry, in Damascus today, The Times reports, but it is also a place where innovative poetry is read, including by poets in exile, politically daring ideas are discussed, a world of alternative sensibility is created.  Not the star poets of the sixties, but young unknowns predominate.  The point is not political agitation nor to showcase celebrity, but the creation of a special place for reading, performance and discussion of the new and challenging.  The article quotes a patron about a recent reading.  “‘In a culture that loathes dialogue,’ the evening represented something different, said Mr. Sawah, the editor of a poetry Web site. ‘What is tackled here,’ he said, ‘would never be approached elsewhere.’”

Cynics would say that the Polish theater and the Syrian salon are safety valve mechanism, through which the young and the marginal can let off steam, as a repressive political culture prevails.  But in Poland, the safety valve overturned the official culture, even before the collapse of the Communist regime, as I explained in my book Beyond Glasnost: the Post Totalitarian Mind.

I don’t want to assert that this happy ending is always the result of such cultural work.  Clearly, it’s not.  But I do want to underscore that the very existence of an alternative sensibility in a repressive context changes the nature of the social order.  Poland was not simply a repressive country then, and Syria is not simply repressive now.  They are places where the possibility for dialogue was established, places where poetry can prevail, and because of this, political culture can be reinvented – in Syria, at least for a discrete number of people in a particular location at a particular time.  But the limits of today may be very different tomorrow.  This I learned as I observed my Polish friends.

This week President Obama gave an important speech in the Oval office announcing the end of combat operations in Iraq.  In October 2002, before the war was declared, he distinguished himself as one of the few political leaders to express clear opposition to the Iraq war.   There is an important connection between his words and his actions, then, which I will consider in today’s post, and now, which I will consider in following posts.

The standard way to account for the connection is through cynical interpretation, explaining the texts of these speeches by referring to their context.  Much is lost in such cynical interpretation–here, the two speeches are Deliberately Considered.

The Context

On October 2, 2002, Obama was a relatively obscure politician, a State Senator considering a run for the United States Senate.  He had some significant movers and shakers in Chicago eyeing him, realizing his promise.  One of them, Bettylu Saltzman, who was organizing the anti-war demonstration, asked him to take part.  His political advisors calculated the costs and benefits, seeing a real problem if he sought to run in a state wide race.  As an African American, he might solidify his support among white liberals, fortifying the black – white coalition base of a potential run, but he may have appealed to them in any case, and he clearly would lose conservative Democratic support and the support of many independents, who at that time were overwhelmingly supporting the President and his impending war.  Nonetheless, since he actually did think that war would be a big mistake, Obama decided to give the speech, notable for its moderation in his opposition to the war:  “I don’t oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war” was the recurring theme.  (See David Remnick, The Bridge).

The moderation of the speech served his immediate purposes and it later helped his candidacy in the Democratic Presidential Primaries.  On this point, David Axelrod, Obama’s chief political consultant, has bemoaned the fact that there was no decent video of the speech.   Obama opposed the war, but tried to demonstrate at the same time that he was not soft on fighting terrorism.  It was a strange speech to give to an anti-war gathering, since he emphasized his support of war.  It was a speech which distinguished just from unjust war, raising serious theoretical problems as it addresses serious practical concerns (which I will address in a later post on his Nobel Prize acceptance address).

The calculation was real.  Obama, like all politicians, is not pure.  Politicians can’t afford to proceed without considering whether they can bring the public along with them.  But in order to actually be effective leaders, they must also base their actions upon their principled commitments.  This is a crucial difference and in this, Obama distinguished himself.  His text reaches beyond its context, and in this way it has enduring significance.

The Text

In his anti war speech he declared:

“I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda.

I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars. So for those of us who seek a more just and secure world for our children, let us send a clear message to the president.

You want a fight, President Bush? Let’s finish the fight with Bin Laden and al-Qaeda, through effective, coordinated intelligence, and a shutting down of the financial networks that support terrorism, and a homeland security program that involves more than color-coded warnings.

You want a fight, President Bush? Let’s fight to make sure that…we vigorously enforce a nonproliferation treaty, and that former enemies and current allies like Russia safeguard and ultimately eliminate their stores of nuclear material, and that nations like Pakistan and India never use the terrible weapons already in their possession, and that the arms merchants in our own country stop feeding the countless wars that rage across the globe…

You want a fight, President Bush? Let’s fight to wean ourselves off Middle East oil through an energy policy that doesn’t simply serve the interests of Exxon and Mobil.

Those are the battles that we need to fight. Those are the battles that we willingly join. The battles against ignorance and intolerance. Corruption and greed. Poverty and despair.”

The Deliberate Consideration

Obama was then a local politician, representing a liberal racially mixed district in the state legislature.  Later as a national politician, he was able to contrast his clear position from his primary opponents because of his early and consistent opposition to the war.  The speech addressed his immediate political calculations, no doubt.  But what is most striking is how his words capture his political commitments and policies now even more than the political calculations then.  He was underscoring his major concerns:  nuclear proliferation, peace in the Middle East, fighting for tolerance, energy independence, and social justice.  He predicted that the war would deflect national attention from these pressing issues, before the war began.  He has been struggling to work on the issues in the aftermath of a war that had the results that he publicly feared.  And the speech was continuous with, not at odds with, his present stance in the wars in Iraq, as the combat mission ends, and in Afghanistan, for better and for worse, as the war continues to pose fundamental problems.

Yesterday’s speech could have been given today.  And today’s speech could have been given yesterday, as I will explore tomorrow.