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Thank goodness for the SmartPeople, especially the “conservative” SmartPeople. Without their wisdom, we not only wouldn’t know what to think and feel, but we would probably think we already knew what we thought and felt. For example, many of us who watched the inauguration on Tuesday and listened to President Obama’s 18 minutes or so of speech, were probably under the impression that we had listened to a very solid and well-written address to the American public. Those of us listening probably noticed that, after a polite tip of the hat to outgoing President Bush, the new president made a number of very serious criticisms of the previous administration (and, by extension, the SmartPeople that puffed that administration up for eight years) and a stern pronouncement that it was time that everyone grew up and stopped behaving like willful children. I thought it was a terrific speech, and hung on every word.
The rightwing SmartPeople have spent the last few days doing their best to deflate whatever excitement was generated on Tuesday. During the election year, they did their level best to convince everyone that Barack Obama was a dangerous radical socialist and a scam artist. Some are continuing to beat that drum, while talking heads like Rush Limbaugh vocally pray for the new administration to fail. And that speech . . . well, according to the wingers, the speech was a complete dud. Boring, lacking in rhetorical brilliance, devoid of catchphrases (although I personally loved “We will restore science to its rightful place”) and, apparently, sending a coded message to Americans that everything President Obama promised during the election was bogus.
Helping once again to straighten our confused brains is Charles Krauthammer. Keep in mind that Krauthammer, who has been batting .0000 for the last eight years in his analysis and prognostication, is responsible for the term “Bush derangement syndrome”, which dismissed any criticism of the Bush administration as being childish hatred of the man, clouding any understanding of his policies. Now Krauthammer steps forward to explain that the inaugural speech was, well, dross.
Fascinating speech. It was so rhetorically flat, so lacking in rhythm and cadence, one almost has to believe he did it on purpose. Best not to dazzle on Opening Day. Otherwise, they’ll expect magic all the time.
The most striking characteristic of Barack Obama is not his nimble mind, engaging manner or wide-ranging intellectual curiosity. It’s the absence of neediness. He’s Bill Clinton, master politician, but without the hunger.
Clinton craves your adulation (the source of all his troubles). Obama will take it, but he can leave it, too. He is astonishingly self-contained. He gives what he must to advance his goals, his programs, his ambitions. But no more. He has no need to.
Which seems to me the only way to understand the mediocrity of his inaugural address. The language lacked lyricism. The content had neither arc nor theme: no narrative trajectory like Lincoln’s second inaugural; no central idea, as was (to take a lesser example) universal freedom in Bush’s second inaugural.
See? It was a boring speech, nothing at all like, oh, the Gettysburg Address. And no central idea. If you were listening, you only thought you were spellbound and you only thought there was a lot of very clear and definite statements. (Hint to Krauthammer: “What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them — that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply.”)
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