|
If America actually had a punditalkcracy instead of a punditalkcrazy, James Fallows would be as well-known as George Will. If you had to read just one book about our media and what's wrong with it, his 1996 book, Breaking The News, could arguably be that one book. Which is why I take it seriously when he writes something about Obama, as he did earlier this week in "Belatedly, on the Cairo speech & Obama rhetoric in general". Just as I hoped, it provides an excellent opportunity for clarifying where I stand with respect to Obama.
The thesis is about Obama's "big" speeches, by which Fallows means his Philadelphia speech on race during the campaign plus five more recent ones: the
June 4 Cairo speech on relations with Islam, the May 21 on anti-terrorism strategy, the >May 17 Notre Dame speech on religion and politics, the April 14 speech at Georgetown on economic strategy, and the April 5 Prague speech on reducing nuclear weapons. Here's what Fallows says:
here is a way to think about why Barack Obama's "big" speeches of the past 15 months seem different from normal political rhetoric. It's because they are...
These six -- including an astonishing five of them in an eight-week burst -- were different from normal rhetoric in the following basic way:
Most of the time, "effective" speeches boil down to finding a better, clearer, cleverer, more vivid, or more memorable way to express what people already think.
In contrast, pointing to his Philadelphia speech on race, Fallows says:
What Obama did in that speech is what he has done, or attempted to do, in those subsequent five big speeches as president. Rather than simply reaffirming or reinforcing what much of the public already thinks; and rather than attempting the relatively common political feat of explaining small changes or compromises in policy; he has tried to change the basic way in which we think about large issues. You can look back on his 2004 Democratic convention speech, given before he'd even been elected to the Senate, as a preview of this approach. By 2008, "not Red states or Blue states..." had become a mere catch phrase. In 2004, during the embittered Bush-Kerry campaign, it was something like a new idea. That's what got him such a response in the convention hall (I was there; it was electrifying), and extensions of that approach are what make his big speeches these days seem different from what we generally hear.
I think Fallows is absolutely right about this, and he goes on to describe what he means even more specifically, in a passage I'll quote on the flip. But at the same time, this helps us focus attention on just what's lacking in Obama, and that can been quite clearly in the current fiasco of his GLBT policy (if, indeed, he can be said to have a GLBT policy.)
The problem, as I see it, is two-fold: (1) a lack of genuine, substantive follow-through, from rhetoric to action, and (2) a lack of real depth in the change he articulates. It may well be a "change [in] the basic way in which we think about large issues", but it's a change that's been just beneath the surface for a long time, a change that people have been hungry for. It's a change in key from major to minor, or the reverse, or maybe even up a half-step--all key-changes that are part of the musician's standard repertoire, if not the politician's.
But it's not as Monty Python would have it, "something completely different." It's not Frank Zappa changing key and time signature at the same time. And it's certainly not Charles Ives, playing in two different keys at once, or Harry Partch, playing in just intonation, with 17 43 notes to the octave. So if Obama hasn't given a major speech on GLBT issues-as some of you are surely already protesting--it's precisely because there is no such latent change on GLBT issues overall, even though there certainly is such a change with regard to their service in the military.
|
STATE BLOGS
