I, for one, am not a big fan of hoopla, so the ongoing roll of inaugural festivities holds little interest for me. Barack Obama's speech tomorrow, owing to all the buildup, will likely be a disappointment. The harder you strive to say something that will carry down through the ages, the less likely your chances of success. Obama can give great speeches (the one on race during the campaign) or turgid ones (the acceptance speech at the convention.) Great oratory comes from the effective use of words with as few syllables as possible. Look no further than the Gettysburg Address, or the King James Bible, the all-time masterpiece of English usage:
Hast thou given the horse strength? hast thou clothed his neck with thunder? He paweth in the valley, and rejoiceth in his strength: he goeth on to meet the armed men...He saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha.
Ha, ha indeed.
Hillary Clinton has famously said that her husband never met a sentence he couldn’t tinker with. Of all the lofty wordage of the Clinton presidency, what quotes from him spring to mind, outside of those associated with Monica Lewinsky? (e.g. "I did not have sex with that woman.") I can’t think of any, except his occasional riff on James Baker’s 1991 remark regarding U. S. involvement in Bosnia; "We don’t have a dog in that fight."
Obama’s job tomorrow will be first, to keep it short, and second, to get to the point. It’s not impossible to imagine that tomorrow he will pay tribute to Martin Luther King, outline the desperate position of the country on all fronts, then sketch a picture of what he plans to do about it. This could be done inside twenty minutes. But it’s equally easy to picture him going off in the other direction, straining through all kinds of rhetorical thickets in hopes of uttering a phrase so ringing people will remember it forever. He would do well to study the lesson of FDR’s first inaugural address, the only line of which that still lives being "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself", which was tossed in at the last minute and provoked no response whatever when delivered. Or he could think of Dr. King’s "I Have a Dream" speech from 1963. All the lines that still resonate were spoken after King had departed from his prepared text, when he began instead to speak from his heart and his experience. Given the scrutiny he will be under tomorrow, it may be too much to expect Barack Obama to take that same risk.