OK, I'm done thinking about Governor Palin. Obviously, John McCain chose her in order to change the subject. He had to do something dramatic, even shocking on Friday to keep the media from gushing over Obama delivering the best nomination acceptance speech in living memory. McCain would be better off setting his own hair on fire for the media instead of letting Obama hold the attention of the nation for even a single day.
So now I'm over that, and I'd like to come back to Obama's speech, which I'd intended to write about all along.
I was deeply moved by the speech -- as were many of you. Yet many commentators, ones who were distant (in more ways than one) from the convention felt that Obama had not quite lived up to expectations. Obama has a formidable reputation as an orator, so meeting these expectations might not have been humanly possible. Naturally, many commentators with an ideological axe to grind were playing the expectations game, but a number of them made an interesting and valid point: Obama is a master of rhetoric, but many of his potent weapons of oratory were not on display.
Those of you who know me for my "Word Sommelier" diaries know that I make something of a hobby of spotting classical rhetorical techniques (anaphora, litotes, erotesis and so forth) in political speeches and advertisements. I am even toying with the idea of producing, some day, a field guide to political oratory. It's not only a fun hobby, it is helpful; both in enjoying political speech for its own sake, and understanding what works or doesn't.
Rhetoric is an art. To master any art, it is of course necessary to understand and master its techniques. But that is not enough. A journeyman's work demonstrates progressive mastery of more and more difficult techniques, up to his ultimate piece, his "masterpiece". Thereafter, great artists often proceed in the opposite direction, toward greater economy and simplicity. In his critical writings the poet Basho was a tremendous advocate of something he called en. "En" is one of those ultimately untranslatable words but it might be approximated as "ineffable beauty". Basho was clearly onto something, because anything readily expressible in clear prose is no justification for poetry. But later in his life, he stunned his contemporaries by abandoning en and insisting on lightness as the supreme virtue of poetry.
In painting, the space not occupied by the subject is called "negative space", and can be as important as the subject. In music, it is the absence of a note in its conventional position as much as its presence in an unconventional position that makes syncopation interesting. In every art, it is the choice of what is not used, the unoccupied space, that distinguishes a great work. Superior work, no matter how exuberant, must also show restraint.
Demonstrations of technical mastery clutter the work of the competent craftsman. In contrast, mastery of many techniques gives the master artist more scope for restraint. A disciplined work has not only the power of what it actually contains, but somehow partakes of the immeasurable potential of what it might have contained. A cluttered work can't fit in everything, nor does it leave room for the ghost what might have been. There's a world of difference between not doing something because you can't, and not doing something because you choose not to. True power comes from not doing things that are clearly within your power. It's a pity that the Bush administration never learned that in foreign policy.
Obama cut the Gordian knot of expectations, the impossible bind that demanded he deliver his address at an inhuman, olympian pitch of drama. His enemies wanted him too fly close to the sun, and then plummet to the ground in front of his classical backdrop. Instead, he did what great artists always do in these no-win situations: he turned expectations on their head. Instead of reaching for the stars, he planted his feet solidly on the Earth.
It's instructive to compare this to John Kerry's 2004 speech. Kerry's speech was quite good, and he delivered it well. It was chock full of rhetorical devices, artfully calculated to build drama. Convention speeches, particularly acceptance speeches follow a formula that is nearly as fixed as the Order of the Mass: an invocation, expressions of gratitude to family and party luminaries (Gloria), an autobiographical Confiteor, and so on. Kerry more or less follows this formula, taking a full twelve minutes of strenuous oratorical gymnastics to build up to formally accepting the nomination. Obama, by contrast, took what should have been a dramatic climax in his speech and disposed of it in the very first sentence.
Obama's speech is a great illustration of how it is possible to take your time and, by doing so, use it well. He had three quarters of an hour to fill, and by tossing out one of the high points of his speech immediately, he had emotional space to spin out a beautiful metaphor in its cathartic wake:
Let me -- let me express -- let me express my thanks to the historic slate of candidates who accompanied me on this journey, and especially the one who traveled the farthest, a champion for working Americans and an inspiration to my daughters and to yours, Hillary Rodham Clinton.
This is the kind of figurative language that is tossed out by the bucketful in political speeches, to be lost in the clutter of rhetorical artifice. As is typical with Obama, he knows just how far he can take a device, in this case a metaphor that stops just this side of becoming a conceit. This is where most political speeches fail: they'd squeeze this metaphor into a tiny space then inflate it until it exploded.
That is artistic mastery at work: it creates empty spaces in which devices have room to work. It was inevitable, on this occasion and on this date, that Obama should evoke Dr. King. The purpose of the classical backdrop was to evoke, not ancient Greece, but the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Obama, whose command of his voice is almost operatic, began to speak with that kind of emotional quaver that we all remember Dr. King had when he had guided us to the summit of the rhetorical mountain and was showing us the promised land. Now Obama could probably bring the susceptible to tears while reading a laundry list, but he used practically all of his three quarters of an hour to bring us imperceptibly, step by step, to this emotional peak.
Here is another emotional peak from Obama's speech:
We are more compassionate than a government that lets veterans sleep on our streets and families slide into poverty.../that sits.../... that sits on its hands while a major American city drowns before our eyes.
Tonight, tonight, I say to the people of America, to Democrats and Republicans and independents across this great land: Enough.
It is utterly impossible to imagine the impact of this small piece out of its context. Clearly, we see this is the climax of rising indignation, bringing us up to the image of the homeless victims of public neglect. But no distillation of Obama's speech into its rhetorical elements will ever explain the power Obama was able to pour into that one, simple word. "Enough." Obama made that word ring out like a pistol shot on a quiet morning. It was literally amazing: he made that perfectly ordinary word astonishing, shocking, invested it with wonderment. Young Basho was right: if you could explain poetry in prose, you wouldn't need poetry.
Obama's speech showed incomparable mastery of pacing and emotional dynamic range. If you want to reach for the emotional stars, you have to start on the firm foundation of logic. Dr. King's speeches were models of crystal clear reasoning yoked to unplumbable depths of feeling. It is contrast that commands attention. Unremitting hope becomes lachrymose. Unremitting anger degenerates into a hysterical rant. Obama demonstrated that he commanded his anger, not the other way around. This was a great fault of Al Gore in his pre Inconvenient Truth days; he tended to scold. Obama's managed to make his words beyond angry: they were stern and credible. This shows how Obama knows, better than any other orator of our day, that power comes not just from what you say, but the space you allow for the those things to work effectively.
We who admire oratory as an art are enjoying the rare historical privilege of witnessing one of its great practitioners at work, like boxing fans who saw Ali vs. Foreman, or jazz fans who heard Billie Holiday in her vocal prime. Obama's nomination acceptance speech was beyond a masterpiece. It was rhetoric of transcendent artistry, precisely because it didn't try to be. Rhetoric is not ultimately about construction and assembly, but communication and persuasion. The aim is for the speaker to connect to the audience, and even the most powerful tools can cut the wrong way on a cluttered workbench.
This is oratory cut to the naked bone: one man moving many with his ideas.