Obama for president

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Obama for president

Like most of us, I know very little about Barack Obama.

He went to Harvard, was the editor of the Harvard Law Review, served in the Illinois legislature and then became a senator from the same state. He was born in Hawaii, has connections with Kenya and Indonesia, and, of course, he’s black. And that’s about it.

There’s also the fact that his rhetorical skills are flushing Democrats out of the woodwork from Maine to Mississippi and giving the nation a taste of high oratory that certainly has been missing since the days of John F. Kennedy. That for the last eight years we’ve been subjected to the bumbling blitheration and English-massacring phraseology of George W. Bush only enhances the impact that Obama is having on anyone who listens to him.

If for no other reason than that I would give the guy a shot at the White House.

The linkage of high end oratory to successful political careers is, after all, not that unusual. One need only read the funeral oration of Pericles in Thucydides to understand how he became so successful a leader in Athens. Or the well-crafted sentences of Cicero to realize why he became such a potent political force.

Little wonder that higher education in classical Athens included required courses in rhetoric – and this specifically for the sake of launching one’s political career.

The point is that words count, and speeches crafted to perfection, with a heavy dose of structural logic and forcefully persuasive elements, are, Hillary Clinton notwithstanding, reflective of an orderly mind transferring logical thoughts and ideas to an audience which has waited all too long to hear such transformative phrases.

One need always take care, to be sure, to distinguish between fancy rhetoric that amounts to little more than destructive and deceptive demagoguery and speeches formulated to bring people together behind a common cause. Franklin D. Roosevelt was a master of the persuasively turned phrase, and the result was always to both calm and exhort a nation on the verge of, or actually in a major war. John F. Kennedy’s inauguration speech, or his remarks at the Berlin wall will never be forgotten because of their exquisite call for a citizenry united in its desire for common national prerogatives.

Quite beyond all that, however, is the fact that Obama, as he says, would represent a major change in the DC landscape. There is every reason to believe that he would move beyond the entrenched political hackery that has pervaded our government for so long and surround himself with top advisors – many of them academically oriented one would hope – who will actually bring some sound expertise to the departments and areas over which they preside.

For too long the American people have been subjected to political appointments made, not on the basis of true knowledge or scientific legitimacy, but rather on ignominious ideological grounds and a political cronyism based on support for a president who is so intellectually at sea with just about every aspect of government as to be embarrassingly intolerable.

Nor do I suspect that a government run by Hillary Clinton would be any less susceptible to the temptation of appointments made on the basis of faithful service during the reign of Bill Clinton. Fine though some of those people, such as Robert Reich, were, the point is that the American people are yearning for a completely new team to clean out the Augean stables and get on with a new intellectually inspired set of positive decisions that will turn this country around.

The very idea that Obama’s foreign policy would include the hitherto rancid notion that we might actually talk to those inimical to us, that he might meet with a Castro or an Ahmadinejad or a Chavez, sends a breath of fresh air out over the whole international process.

If Barack Obama and his rhetorical abilities are indicative of anything, it is that the man can think logically and formulate plans worthy of discussion. Given what we’ve been through for the past eight years, that alone should secure him a job at the White House.

Will he be ready on Day One? I have no idea. Nor did I have any idea whether John Kennedy would be ready on Day One when I voted for him. But I was inspired enough by his ability to convey an activist substance that had withered under Dwight Eisenhower to give him a shot.

And so it is with Obama, whose youth, vitality, sharp wits and lack of affiliation with the eternally glued political establishment in Washington might be just what we need to transform a country in the deadly grip of debilitating sameness.

March 12, 2008