By Robin Wagner-Pacifici, January 20th, 2011
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 . . .
Read more: The Tuscon Speech: Not the Gettysburg Address
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, January 14th, 2011
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 . . .
Read more: The President’s Speech
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, January 11th, 2011
 Anticipating the State of the Union address, with Robin Wagner – Pacifici’s recent post in mind, I thought it would be a good idea to remember how President Obama has used the power of his voice to address political problems. I agree with Robin and with Jonathan Alter that one must govern and not only campaign in poetry. I agree with Robin that such poetry is appropriate about significant matters of state, particularly about war and peace. But I think we should remember that key problems of national identity and purpose, not only matters of war and peace, require such poetry. Today the Race Speech. I will consider other key speeches in subsequent posts.
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 . . .
Read more: Anticipating the State of the Union Address; Looking Back at the Philadelphia Race Speech
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, September 24th, 2010 
In my previous research, I’ve examined how local arts movements can have a big impact on regional politics.
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 . . .
Read more: In Syria: Poetry Salon Provides Release, Freedom
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, September 6th, 2010
This post is one in a series.
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 . . .
Read more: Obama on Iraq: Then and Now
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