In the thick of the pathos he sneaks in a trick. Healthcare was and is a great divide in American politics. Should it be a state or an individual responsibility? Only a moment before this, Obama had been advocating individual duty. With skilful manipulation of the mood and ordering of the topics, he swaps sides, clinching the case with a harrowing and irresistible story about the tears shed for a young girl’s salvaged future. With the audience now involved emotionally, Obama then leaps to cite the young girl as the definition of America. A partisan policy has become, in a few deft sentences: ‘That’s who we are. That’s the country I’m so proud to lead as your president’. Rhetorical skill like that is brilliant but we need to be on the alert.
And tonight, despite all the hardship we’ve been through, despite all the frustrations of Washington, I’ve never been more hopeful about our future. I have never been more hopeful about America. And I ask you to sustain that hope. I’m not talking about blind optimism, the kind of hope that just ignores the enormity of the tasks ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path. I’m not talking about the wishful idealism that allows us to just sit on the sidelines or shirk from a fight. I have always believed that hope is that stubborn thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us so long as we have the courage to keep reaching, to keep working, to keep fighting. America, I believe we can build on the progress we’ve made and continue to fight for new jobs and new opportunity and new security for the middle class. I believe we can keep the promise of our founders, the idea that if you’re willing to work hard, it doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from or what you look like or where you love. It doesn’t matter whether you’re black or white or Hispanic or Asian or Native American or young or old or rich or poor, able, disabled, gay or straight, you can make it here in America if you’re willing to try. I believe we can seize this future together because we are not as divided as our politics suggests. We’re not as cynical as the pundits believe. We are greater than the sum of our individual ambitions, and we remain more than a collection of red states and blue states. We are and forever will be the United States of America. And together with your help and God’s grace we will continue our journey forward and remind the world just why it is that we live in the greatest nation on Earth. Thank you, America. God bless you. God bless these United States.
Ever since Barack Obama was lifted to the presidency of the United States on a high tide of language, politicians have wanted to be like him. They should pause and consider the ways in which they are not like Barack Obama. There is, in fact, almost no end to the ways in which they are not like Barack Obama. First, they are not president of the United States. Second, they do not have his gift for language. Third, they do not have his voice. Fourth and most important, they are not a black president in a nation still scarred by slavery, the silent subject of the Gettysburg Address. Obama touches on that question in the meritocratic section of this passage, and it is granted the greater force because he is saying it. A black man becoming the president of the United States of America is one of the greatest stories ever told in all the annals of politics.
Martin Luther King’s vision has not yet been achieved in full, but it would take a hard heart to suggest that Obama’s presidency is not one act in the drama of his dream. This is the context when Obama speaks and it lends historic weight to his every word. None of this would apply if your task is to present the strategic objectives to the sales team or if you are on in the just-after-lunch slot discussing council tax at the annual conference of the Local Government Chronicle. Important a topic as that is (and it is), it has a register of its own which is not the same as that of a victorious president in the world’s most powerful democracy. The lesson here is: respect your occasion. If you pretend you are speaking on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and have the ear of the world cocked for your words, you do not elevate your subject; you diminish it. Obama can do this because of who he is and the context he speaks in. If the ending reads on the page as slightly boilerplate Obama, it works in the hearing. Hope is not always an audacious emotion to evoke. It can sound vacuous if it is not attached to the power to realise it in the world. Without pragmatic politics, hope is a wish-list. Which makes the defining point. The finest political hopes are those of an elected president of a free country.
THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESSES
On the centenary celebration of the Gettysburg Address on 19 November 1963, the sitting president of the United States was indisposed. He was required to fly down to Texas to appear in Dallas with Vice-President Lyndon Johnson. Instead of speaking at Gettysburg, as he had been requested to do, President John F. Kennedy sent a message that read: ‘On this solemn occasion let us all rededicate ourselves to the perpetuation of those ideals of which Lincoln spoke so luminously. As Americans, we can do no less.’
Kennedy’s place at Gettysburg was taken by a famous resident. Dwight D. Eisenhower had been stationed in Gettysburg during the First World War as the commander of the US Army Tank Corps Training Center. After the Second World War he had bought a 189-acre farm on the site where, in 1952, he held a picnic to open his campaign for the presidency. During his time in the White House, Eisenhower would often spend the weekend in Gettysburg, shooting skeet and inspecting his herd of Angus show cattle. It was here, in the farm that became known as the ‘Temporary White House’, that he recuperated from his heart attack in 1955 and here that he received the world’s dignitaries.
In 1961, General and Mrs Eisenhower retired to Gettysburg, where the ex-president began work on his memoirs. He was called upon to perform this one last major service, though, to stand in for his successor President Kennedy. President Eisenhower used his centenary address to summon the noble destiny and unity which had inspired Lincoln. Though Lincoln’s words retain their power to move, said Eisenhower, ‘the unfinished work of which he spoke in 1863 is still unfinished; because of human frailty it always will be’. The task was to pass on, as best we could, the legacy bequeathed by Lincoln: ‘a nation free, with liberty, dignity and justice for all’.
Despite the solemnity of the occasion and the gravity of his words, President Eisenhower’s speech has been lost to posterity because three days later the man who should have made the speech at Gettysburg, John F. Kennedy, was assassinated. The bullets in Dallas completed a gruesome symmetry around the most famous speech in the political canon. Both the man who was never meant to make the Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln, and the man who was but didn’t, John F. Kennedy, were assassinated, almost a century apart.
Ever since Abraham Lincoln consecrated the spot in 1863, American presidents have repaired to the battlefield at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to pay homage to the American Republic that Lincoln’s 272 words were designed to save. In 1878, Rutherford B. Hayes hoped that contemplation of the National Cemetery would allow Americans to appreciate those who ‘gave their lives for the Union, liberty, and for a stable, constitutional government’. Beating even Lincoln for brevity, Hayes spoke just 253 words, forty-four of which were in quoting Lincoln’s last sentence. In 1904, in a lesson about applying the disciplines of war to win the liberty of peace, Theodore Roosevelt commended the soldiers who had made their countrymen forever their debtors. On the fiftieth anniversary of Lincoln’s address in 1913, Woodrow Wilson celebrated reconciliation and offered a paean to a nation ‘undivided in interest’. On Memorial Day, 30 May 1928, Calvin Coolidge observed the usual pieties, dwelling on America’s interest in maintaining global peace and depicting the American economy, just prior to the Wall Street crash of 1929, as prosperously content.
Two years later, in a Gettysburg Address about the common good, Herbert Hoover issued a warning against demagoguery and said that ‘the weaving of freedom is and always will be a struggle of law against lawlessness, of individual liberty against domination, of unity against sectionalism, of truth and honesty against demagoguery and misleading, of peace against fear and conflict.’ In 1938, Franklin D. Roosevelt came to Gettysburg to sound a warning, which has extraordinary contemporary resonance, to those who seek to ‘build political advantage by the distortion of facts; those who, by declining to follow the rules of the game, seek to gain an unfair advantage over those who are willing to live up to the rules of