Anna Quindlen: Era Of Good Speaking

[babylonsister]

http://www.newsweek.com/id/178844


THE LAST WORD
Anna Quindlen
Era Of Good Speaking

The atmosphere demands it, the American people need it. The Inaugural Address should be the first salvo by an orator in chief.
Published Jan 10, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Jan 19, 2009


Dear president-elect Obama, your Inaugural Address looms, and the weight of both history and reputation is upon you. There is a sense that this should be a great speech, a momentous speech, a speech to make the hair rise on the neck and the heart sing in the breast. Odd, because no one really remembers any of the Inaugural speeches that have gone before. They remember snippets, or what are now called sound bites. "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," which wasn't actually Franklin Roosevelt's but was added by his aide Louis Howe. "Ask not what your country can do for you," a kind of political Zen koan. Lincoln's "better angels of our nature," perhaps the most lyrical of all, which he rescued from an exceedingly grand draft by one of his team of rivals that spoke of "the guardian angel of the nation." The grand is the enemy of the great.

Your rhetoric will be judged by great expectations based on little evidence. But it will also be judged on the commonly held opinion that oratory is one of your strong suits. Just as Lincoln's 1860 speech at Cooper Union, for which he was paid $200, transformed him into the front runner for his party's nomination, so the speech you gave at the 2004 Democratic convention turned you from, in your own words, "a skinny kid with a funny name" into someone to watch, to work for, to support and, finally, into the first black president of the United States. "There is not a liberal America and a conservative America—there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America—there's the United States of America"—it was a bell you would keep on ringing as you ran.

So here's my suggestion: keep talking. There was some snark during the campaign that you were merely Mr. Podium, a guy who knew how to take a pretty phrase and sell it in lieu of policy. But now you've got a clutch of people to handle the policy stuff, and only you in the pulpit. No one should underestimate what a succession of inspired secular sermons can mean in a time of civic darkness. There are moments in history when a leader needs to be much more than a manager. He needs to unite, to inspire and to challenge. There's no better way to do that than by delivering a great speech about great matters.

snip//


And remember that specifics are overrated. You will need some in your first State of the Union, or whatever they call it when you've barely figured out where they keep the paper clips. (Whatever you do, don't use the clichéd line that the state of the union is strong, or your credibility will be instantly shot.) But remember the speech your predecessor gave immediately after a hurricane had decimated a major American city and exposed the glaring abyss of class and race that existed there: the people of New Orleans needed hope, and he assured them that they would soon have 3.4 million pounds of ice.

A person gives up a lot for this job, and it certainly can't be to report that the iceman cometh. When your girls set off for their first day at a new school, it was painful to watch the parade of Suburbans and bodyguards. You're now totally in The Bubble, the one that ensures that the person running the country no longer gets any sense of what living here entails. The movie "Dave" sums that up with a climactic long shot in which the putative president walks off alone, leaving the agents and the limo in the distance. You lost that option forever in November.

But when the staff brings you takeout—because giving up privacy is one thing, moo shu pork quite another—I hope you get a fortune cookie with this Chinese proverb: speech is the voice of the heart. There is one good way to appear willing to break out of The Bubble, and that's to talk to the American people. Some people say that YouTube will be your version of the fireside chat. But small-bore intimacy is not necessarily what the people always want from their president. Sometimes it's grandeur, the big ideas, the great thoughts, not as a substitute for action, but as a supplement. A poet will declaim as you're sworn in. After that, the responsibility for civic poetry is all yours.

© 2009

[Political_Junkie]

1. Nice!

Thanks for the heads up on this one. Good read!

[babylonsister]

2. Anytime. I think she's a gifted writer. nt

[Political_Junkie]

3. Yes.

She is very gifted. And I think she'll get her wish here too, because our soon to be President is also very gifted with words. Should be a great speech!