by Rushworth M. Kidder
Presidential contender Barack Obama’s March 18 speech on race was widely applauded as one of the most compelling speeches of our time. But why? What made it so?
True, he spoke with authority on a much-avoided topic. He dignified his audience’s intelligence, addressing their thinking rather than manipulating their emotions. He confronted a serious challenge without ducking or spinning. And he lifted the discourse from the merely defensive to the genuinely philosophical. But lots of politicians do that, at least from time to time. Obama’s speech seemed a cut above the rest. Why?
The answer, I think, lies in a kind of coherence that was musical in its impact. In an almost symphonic way, he interwove three strands of oratorical skill — a rhetorical structure, a moral theme, and a narrative conviction — into an integrated whole.
Rhetorical structure. This speech moved through three broad topics: an exposition of his own story and his relationship to Rev. Jeremiah Wright, an analysis of that relationship as an illustration of a racial divisiveness that “this nation cannot afford to ignore,” and a proposal for addressing that divisiveness by finding the “common stake we all have in one another.” Throughout this architecture ran a motif of balanced, two-part statements and counterstatements that included:
- A condemnation of Rev. Wright’s “distorted view of this country,” followed by an explanation of why he cannot utterly disown him
- A discussion of the buried anger in the black community, matched by a discussion of white anger
- His call for blacks to “squarely [face] our own complicity in our condition,” balanced by a call for some whites to stop “dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice … as mere political correctness”
- A choice between an old “politics that breeds division” and a new politics of hope
This duality also showed up in numerous well-balanced sentences, as when he spoke of the gap between “the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time,” the fact that we have “different stories, but we hold common hopes,” and the need to “embrace the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past.” These doublets may be nearly invisible, but they build verbal intensity just as surely as symphonic structure intensifies musical notes until, without quite knowing why, we feel moved.
Moral theme. Within this architecture, two related themes laced themselves together. The first centered on the word perfect, a note he struck eleven times from his very first sentence (”a more perfect union”) to his penultimate word (”that is where perfection begins”). But perfection is a daring theme in an age of ethical relativism. It opens him to the sneers of cynics, who contemptuously dismiss perfection as a silly impossibility. Yet for Obama to have called for anything less would have undercut the idealism of his campaign. His solution? Invoke the powerful but grammatically suspect constitutional phrase “more perfect.” Setting aside the problem of how anything perfect can become even more so, Obama used that phrase to focus on progress toward perfection rather than on demands for its absolute state. His variations on this theme touched on Rev. Wright (”as imperfect as he may be”) and included a seemingly casual but artfully self-deprecating comment on himself (”a candidacy as imperfect as my own.”)
The second theme, expressed as hope, began early and built to a crescendo. As with perfection, this word also risked the cynics’ wrath. Yet a focus on a hopeful future was crucial to his message. In a moment of real insight, he noted that Rev. Wright’s “profound mistake” was that “he spoke as if our society was static,” without any progress upon which to found a sense of hope. Without hope — Obama’s signature word — nothing can be made “more perfect.” Yet while “this union may never be perfect,” he declared, “generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected.” Again, the thematic interplay of perfection and hope was all the more powerful for being only semi-recognized by his listeners.
Narrative conviction. In a rich and many-layered moment, Obama didn’t just tell the story of his formative experience in Rev. Wright’s church. Instead, he quoted a paragraph from his earlier book about how the church used Biblical stories to explain the moral story of the black experience. If that story-within-story-within-story seems complex, the result was a powerfully simple statement of how “our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal” as “the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, [and] Ezekiel’s field of dry bones.” In the end, this was a story about the importance of stories in helping us make meaning out of moral complexity. Not accidentally, then, his speech ended with a story. It was about Ashley, a young white campaign organizer, and an elderly black man in Florence, South Carolina, whose simple comment — “I’m here because of Ashley” — was layered with multiple meanings.
For most politicians, such stories are for adornment, amplifying the logic of the speech. For Obama, by contrast, logic is the setting for gem-like narratives. Like the Biblical stories in black churches, his stories don’t simply illustrate his point. They are his point. And that, I think, helps explain Obama’s appeal. Most politicians, relying on the principles of sociology and political science, start with facts or polling data and, if needed, round out their talks with what they sometimes see as “mere” anecdotes. Obama, relying on the traditions of literature and the humanities, understands that symbolic narrative can often convey a moral message better than data-driven discourse.
Which explains why the Democratic primary features two such different candidates. On one side of the party’s individual-versus-community divide are those who, seeing sociologically, build science-like constructs in which the community trumps the individual. On the other side are those who, seeing narratively, use the literary imagination to focus more on the lives of real people — flawed, imperfect, but authentic — than the group. If Obama’s speech had an unfamiliar but welcome resonance, it was because he spoke to an almost-forgotten hunger in us all for the symphonic, elevating, and deeply moral stories of real, recognizable people. Will that win nominations? Who knows. But it certainly makes good speeches.
©2008 Institute for Global Ethics
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