Politics is difficult. Change is ground out slowly. It is often boring to do, let alone to watch. Slow, incremental improvement – the vital currency of democratic politics – is hard to turn to rhetorical gold. It takes great skill to turn ‘Let us proceed slowly and cautiously’ into a rallying cry, but this is what Obama does here. He is borrowing the form of the uplifting call-to-arms to play down expectations. Obama is a master of the glorious compromise, the beautiful consensus, the slow change that lifts the heart.
Obama restates America’s meritocratic idea of itself – a compliment America pays itself quite wrongly, its rates of social mobility being lower than most comparable democracies – in a reminder that the path to the ideal of the republic is never easy. It is an important dream. The idea that individual enterprise will gain its due reward is America’s foundation myth. It’s never been as true as it should be but it would be even less true than it is if there were no myth expressed at all. Obama, though, cleverly lays it on thin. Rhetoric is too easily an art that exaggerates, and Obama has more gifts in the art than most. Here, he is deliberately reining himself in, to make an important point about the application of power.
Our economy is recovering. A decade of war is ending. A long campaign is now over. And whether I earned your vote or not, I have listened to you, I have learned from you, and you’ve made me a better president. And with your stories and your struggles, I return to the White House more determined and more inspired than ever about the work there is to do and the future that lies ahead. Tonight you voted for action, not politics as usual. You elected us to focus on your jobs, not ours. And in the coming weeks and months, I am looking forward to reaching out and working with leaders of both parties to meet the challenges we can only solve together. Reducing our deficit. Reforming our tax code. Fixing our immigration system. Freeing ourselves from foreign oil. We’ve got more work to do. But that doesn’t mean your work is done. The role of citizen in our democracy does not end with your vote. America’s never been about what can be done for us. It’s about what can be done by us together through the hard and frustrating, but necessary work of self-government. That’s the principle we were founded on. This country has more wealth than any nation, but that’s not what makes us rich. We have the most powerful military in history, but that’s not what makes us strong. Our university, our culture are all the envy of the world, but that’s not what keeps the world coming to our shores. What makes America exceptional are the bonds that hold together the most diverse nation on earth. The belief that our destiny is shared; that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another and to future generations. The freedom which so many Americans have fought for and died for comes with responsibilities as well as rights. And among those are love and charity and duty and patriotism. That’s what makes America great.
The list of the items in the White House in-tray continues the theme of sober administration. It won’t be every anthology that immortalises the line ‘reforming the tax code’. I have a dream … of reforming the tax code. Still, this is what good politics does. It is also crucial for Obama, the high priest of vague hope, to make a claim to practical achievement. This is his recognition that expressions of hope not anchored in the world are frivolous.
Then Obama reverses the burden of proof, much as Kennedy had done with ‘ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country’ in his 1961 Inaugural. Presidential speeches, at least until Donald Trump, make up a single story, the story of American democracy. Presidents are conscious of each other, and no other country’s leaders quote their predecessors more than the Americans do. They are not citing heroes or sainted icons, as a Labour Party figure would with Clement Attlee or Aneurin Bevan. They are invoking the prestige of the office. Obama’s riff about what can be done by us rather than for us is more or less a direct lift from Kennedy, who was himself echoing Lincoln.
This is an elegant reminder of the limitations of politics and the narrow range of the state. Just as the law is upheld by voluntary compliance rather than by enforcement, so government makes demands of its citizens. Democracy is a culture and a pattern of behaviour. The early days of President Trump have shown us that this point applies to the president himself. The American constitution makes a fetish of its documents but it works in practice through the tacit understanding of the people who make it work. The president has to understand that if he pushes the executive order too far he is upsetting the balance. The formal mechanism of the court will strike back, but the very act of constitutional defiance is damaging. The checks and the balances are two separate things. The balance in the classical tradition is observed by the participants who are checked if they refuse to comply. Obama here defines the bond of America, the glory of the republic, as duty. The language is less ornate but, intellectually, this is classical. The ideas of the Roman republic are still intact.
I am hopeful tonight because I’ve seen the spirit at work in America. I’ve seen it in the family business whose owners would rather cut their own pay than lay off their neighbours, and in the workers who would rather cut back their hours than see a friend lose a job. I’ve seen it in the soldiers who re-enlist after losing a limb and in those SEALs who charged up the stairs into darkness and danger because they knew there was a buddy behind them watching their back. I’ve seen it on the shores of New Jersey and New York, where leaders from every party and level of government have swept aside their differences to help a community rebuild from the wreckage of a terrible storm. And I saw just the other day, in Mentor, Ohio, where a father told the story of his eight-year-old daughter, whose long battle with leukaemia nearly cost their family everything had it not been for healthcare reform passing just a few months before the insurance company was about to stop paying for her care. I had an opportunity to not just talk to the father, but meet this incredible daughter of his. And when he spoke to the crowd listening to that father’s story, every parent in that room had tears in their eyes, because we knew that little girl could be our own. And I know that every American wants her future to be just as bright. That’s who we are. That’s the country I’m so proud to lead as your president.
The skilled speaker needs watching. This speech has been given with the aim of healing, and the first part of this passage is generously ecumenical. Vital categories are ticked off in a list of commendations: small-town American entrepreneurs, soldiers in the field, the US Navy. Note, in passing, how not saying something says it so effectively. The audience would all be aware that Obama is referring to the killing by Navy SEALs of Osama bin Laden, public enemy number one. The president doesn’t need to spell it out. The success of the mission is evoked the better for being modestly done. Nothing establishes standing as a national leader like defeating an enemy – this is Cicero and Mark Antony revisited – and Obama uses it politically to make a point in his own favour.
He slides from this triumph to praise for the cross-party response to a hurricane in New Jersey, and from there into a story about health care. The craft