America is about to experience a profound sense of whiplash as power is transferred from a president whose eloquence brought him to the public stage to one whose modes of communication are largely limited to political pep rallies (including the occasional pep rally disguised as a press conference) and “mean tweets”.
We can argue until the end of time about how we got here: a Russian kompromat operation; a grandstanding, partisan FBI director; or a failure to plan campaign stops for the Democratic candidate in Milwaukee, Detroit and Philadelphia due to hubris or bad data or both. But what belies argument is the fact that we are witnessing a sea change in the way the president of the United States communicates – from “hope over fear” to “American carnage”.
Barack Obama is one of a handful of presidents considered not just a good speaker but a great one (Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John F Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton come to mind). He shares with Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan the distinction of coming to prominence on the basis of a speech (Obama’s anti-war speech in 2002, Lincoln’s anti-slavery addresses, and Reagan’s “A Time for Choosing” in support of Republican candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964).
Beyond his raw ability to deliver on the dais, Obama speaks to the fundamental promise of America. As the first person of African descent to rise to that position, he is unique not only in this former slave republic but in the west, where no other country has elevated someone from an ethnic minority to its highest office. For African Americans, he spoke to the ultimate hope and recognition of our citizenship; to the fulfilment of the dream written in the founding documents that so conspicuously excluded us.
Obama’s uncanny talent for pulling hope out of even the dark firmament of America’s history of slavery, racism and segregation placed him in the ranks not just of presidents, but of abolitionists and civil rights leaders, who saw past America’s uneven execution of its founding creed to its potential to perfect it. Indeed, as my co-editor on We Are the Change We Seek, EJ Dionne asserts, the notion of “perfecting our union” is a chord that runs throughout Obama’s body of speeches. For him, the word perfect is an active verb, not an adjective.
Obama was in a unique position to give voice to the hopes, but also the pain, of black people, as when he eulogised the Charleston Nine, who were massacred in church by a domestic terrorist driven by racism. That day he surprised everyone: spontaneously departing from his prepared text to sing the lines of the spiritual Amazing Grace, which tells of a former slaver’s moral reprieve.
Years before, he spoke to the Muslim world in Cairo, and dreamed a world in which Christianity, Judaism and Islam greet each other with mutual respect.
It was a talent Obama used too sparingly to speak to racial and religious bigotry, in the view of many of even his most ardent admirers. Or it was a cudgel he wielded too often, in the view of his detractors, as when he added calls for racial tolerance to his remarks on the murder of five police officers in Dallas in 2016 during a protest against police shootings of black men.
Obama was perhaps at his most eloquent in 2015, when he spoke at the 50th anniversary of the 1965 march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. Delivered just miles from Shelby, Alabama, whose name is affixed to the supreme court decision gutting the very Voting Rights Act whose passage was bought with the blood of activists such as John Lewis, that speech was in many ways his masterpiece. It blended Christian scripture: the intonation to “rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer”, with the words of James Baldwin, that we “are capable of bearing a great burden … once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is”. He spoke, as he often does, of Martin Luther King’s “fierce urgency of now”, and called on young activists to recognise the racial progress America has made, even as they call for more in the wake of the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner and others.
Obama, at his best, can soar; as when in defeat in New Hampshire in 2008, he assured his devastated supporters: “Yes we can.” His ability to describe the nation’s pain and its possibilities with subtlety and maturity and grace will soon be sorely missed.
Donald Trump could not present a starker departure from the ecumenism of Obama’s approach – as his traducement of Lewis laid bare. If Obama speaks to the whole country, including those who refuse to hear him, Trump narrows his focus to those already lined up behind him. When Trump speaks, (or tweets) it is bluster and boasts – he even sends his press secretary out to claim “the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration”. Even now, he fixates on his victory, rarely offering grace to his foes.
Trump speaks of an America that is broken and in decline, and whose best days are behind it. In that sense, he does speak for millions of Americans who feel robbed of the America of their vivid dreams of a gauzy past, before the turbulence of civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights; the competition for jobs and the cultural and demographic shifts brought on by non-white immigrants.
And he names himself as the country’s only hope. “I alone can fix it”, and “I am your voice” were the signature lines of Trump’s longest speech to date, as he accepted the Republican nomination for president in the summer of 2016.
Where Obama speaks of Americans being the change they seek, Trump asserts that he is the change. Where Obama calls for holding fast to the nation’s founding principles, Trump revives the Nixonian call for “law and order”. It’s a dark, menacing vision of a country in crisis, at risk of being overwhelmed by refugees and supposedly violent racial minorities. And it’s a fundamentally authoritarian vision that Obama, in his final address, subtly called out, without calling Trump by name.
We will soon find out which president’s vision prevails.
• Joy-Ann Reid is co-editor, with EJ Dionne, of We Are the Change We Seek: the Speeches of Barack Obama
• This article was amended on 23 January 2017 to clarify that it was Shelby’s name attached to the supreme court’s decision about the Voting Rights Act, not Edmund Pettus’, a mistake arising as a result of an editing error. Another editing error introduced confusion into the third paragraph, suggesting that Ronald Reagan and Abraham Lincoln had come to prominence as a consequence of anti-war speeches.
