Obama's economic speech, graded

A bonus today: Allan Louden, whom readers of CharlotteObserver.com last fall know as The Ballot's political professor, watched one more speech for us - Barack Obama's economic address to Congress last night.

Louden, a debate scholar and political communications professor at Wake Forest University, informed and entertained Ballot readers since the primaries with his insightful analysis of ads, speeches and debates.

He expected Obama's state of the union-ish speech to be sober and reassuring. What did he get?

The Professor says:

If one had an ounce of patriotism flowing in their veins, it would be impossible to remain unmoved as the President of the United States was introduced to the chamber last night. Ideology be damned, it felt good to envision a can-do-attitude, an America that works, buoyancy in the face of permeating pessimism.

I have been critiquing Obama’s rhetoric for almost a year now. I noticed my commentary has increasingly been disillusioned with the power of his speeches, or at least his choice for a muted voice.

In that vein, I envisaged his intentional blandness to continue with last night’s speech. State-of-the-Union speeches, in general, have a way of disappointing. The build up is intense; the speeches are often little more than laundry lists of vague policy initiatives, almost guaranteed to disappoint.

Yet what I witnessed was from a rhetorical perspective among the best in this genre I heard, surely since Reagan’s first State-of-the-Union. And it is a truism of those who follow political communication that rhetorical skill often translates into real political authority.

Obama’s “State-of-the-Union” may have been an imitation of the formal address, but he was not a simulation of a president in charge.

Constructing Optimism

The speech began with a positive tone, a compliment to the American character and ingenuity and continued with Obama the positivist, as Obama ticked off a myriad of issues. It was Obama not as magician or allegorical high priest, but rather the logician, the empiricist positing lines of reasoning and facts. Topics were discussed, not exhorted; plain yet cutting in their directness.

This alone describes a speech that should have been tedious and tiresome, yet that was not the outcome in Obama’s hands. It worked. What follows is a selective tour of how Obama amends the commonplace.

Obama used the power of defining that only resides with the president. His words change how we see issues and policy. Even a looming depression was distanced by America’s character:

"The weight of this crisis will not determine the destiny of this nation. The answers to our problems don’t lie beyond our reach. They exist in our laboratories and universities; in our fields and our factories; in the imaginations of our entrepreneurs and the pride of the hardest-working people on Earth."

Donning the role of historian, he defines an “opportunity in crisis,” the inevitability of revival:

"In the midst of civil war, we laid railroad tracks from one coast to another that spurred commerce and industry. From the turmoil of the Industrial Revolution came a system of public high schools that prepared our citizens for a new age. In the wake of war and depression, the GI Bill sent a generation to college and created the largest middle-class in history. And a twilight struggle for freedom led to a nation of highways, an American on the moon, and an explosion of technology that still shapes our world."

Obama never strayed far from the political pulse even as he redefined. Obama scolded bankers and asked for their survival. He summarized, “It’s not about helping banks, it’s about helping people.”

Even the budget was rhetorically transformed.

"So often, we have come to view these documents as simply numbers on a page or laundry lists of programs. I see this document differently. I see it as a vision for America – as a blueprint for our future."

Integration

Surely Obama will be criticized for taking on too much, and perhaps that will be the case. Yet Obama has a way of assimilating issues so they are not separate schemes but entwined in a larger portrait. Energy, health care, and education meld into a consistent whole; product of our national character.

Energy becomes innovation, Health care becomes fiscal responsibility, and Education becomes the promise to our future; values that inhere in the nation’s fabric, each inviting individual promise and participation.

The speech was serious but not calamitous. There were no signs of gloomy foreboding, more a rendering of a nation we would hope to inhabit. The greater parts of the speech were moments of toughness and sobriety, yet there remained room for genuine humor. As in life, and not politics, the speech showed an amalgamation of strict and forgiving.

The address was demonstrative, never pleading. Obama did not so much ask Congress for their cooperation but issued a statement of how-it-is. Obama exhorted “this truth”--those called to serve, entrusted by the people—are responsible to history and “the spirit of the people who sent us here.”

He closed with stories of the Florida banker who gave his considerable bonus to his employees, his friends; how a devastated Kansas town rebuilt it hope in sustainable ways; of a South Carolina school child who embraced the possible and demanded the same of others. Congress was instructed to get on board, to channel the spirit of those who empower their Washington presence.

"[T]hese stories tell us something about the spirit of the people who sent us here. They tell us that even in the most trying times, amid the most difficult circumstances, there is a generosity, a resilience, a decency, and a determination that perseveres; a willingness to take responsibility for our future and for posterity."

Unlike speeches of the last few months, Obama’s rhetoric soared in the closing, inspiring, rarifying our better angels. It felt good.

". . . if we come together and lift this nation from the depths of this crisis; if we confront without fear the challenges of our time and summon that enduring spirit of an America that does not quit, then someday years from now our children can tell their children that this was the time when we performed, in the words that are carved into this very chamber, 'something worthy to be remembered.' "

Obama’s hope of earlier primary speeches returned, and appropriately.

Grade: A