up, we have fought our way back, and we know in our hearts that for the United States of America the best is yet to come.
The first task in the instant aftermath of every election victory is to bind the nation. Obama does this by placing himself within the history of the republic and attaching it to the entire present nation. Election campaigns are, by their nature, divisive. The criticism that politics divides people is always wrong. People are divided. It is the nature of human beings to disagree. Politics is the means by which that division is recognised, negotiated and settled.
That is Obama’s opening and defining purpose in a speech that is a paean to politics itself. That central argument makes sense of the idea of perfecting the union. Obama, like Jefferson has before him, makes it clear that the process towards perfection will never end. It is, after all, only the pursuit of happiness that the constitution protects, not its accomplishment. The road is hard, the journey long, and success is never assured. The best resource that the public have in the eternal pursuit is to be as one, a single family brought together after the electoral verdict has been entered, as a single political community. The night of a general election realises and thwarts ambitions in an instant. The moment opens the crack. The task of the president is to let the light flood back in. That allows him to conclude that the best is yet to come.
I know that political campaigns can sometimes seem small, even silly. And that provides plenty of fodder for the cynics that tell us that politics is nothing more than a contest of egos or the domain of special interests. But if you ever get the chance to talk to folks who turned out at our rallies and crowded along a rope line in a high school gym, or saw folks working late in a campaign office in some tiny county far away from home, you’ll discover something else. You’ll hear the determination in the voice of a young field organiser who’s working his way through college and wants to make sure every child has that same opportunity. You’ll hear the pride in the voice of a volunteer who’s going door to door because her brother was finally hired when the local auto plant added another shift. You’ll hear the deep patriotism in the voice of a military spouse who’s working the phones late at night to make sure that no one who fights for this country ever has to fight for a job or a roof over their head when they come home. That’s why we do this. That’s what politics can be. That’s why elections matter. It’s not small, it’s big. It’s important. Democracy in a nation of 300 million can be noisy and messy and complicated. We have our own opinions. Each of us has deeply held beliefs. And when we go through tough times, when we make big decisions as a country, it necessarily stirs passions, stirs up controversy. That won’t change after tonight, and it shouldn’t. These arguments we have are a mark of our liberty. We can never forget that as we speak, people in distant nations are risking their lives right now just for a chance to argue about the issues that matter, the chance to cast their ballots like we did today.
In its way one of the most quietly moving passages Obama has ever uttered. This is not the most dramatic speech he ever gave, nor the one that most directly stirs the emotions. Obama’s speech about race in 2008 and his victory speech the same year in Grant Park may be greater. His decision to sing ‘Amazing Grace’ after the murder of the Reverend Pinckney in Charleston in 2015 is one of the most affecting moments of public speech there is. Obama often sounds like he is singing; on that occasion he actually was.
But here, in this prosaic passage, Obama sets out a manifesto for politics and the hope it carries for progress. For someone viewed as a lyrical speaker, you might be surprised to find that, like Molière’s bourgeois gentleman, Obama has been speaking prose all his life. Mario Cuomo’s line that politicians campaign in poetry and govern in prose is quoted too often, not least because it’s wrong. Obama shows that politicians campaign in prose too, but that if the prose is good enough then the effect can be poetic.
More than any other speaker, with the exception of Martin Luther King, with whom he shares a vocal style, Obama needs to be heard rather than read. The way he slides down the consonants, dwelling on a word so that the stress imparts unmined meaning. The way he pauses, in complete control; his silences better than most people’s words. The way his voice contains the music and the rhythm in a vocal pattern that is closer to singing than to speaking and which is the secular transfer of an idiom that can be heard in the black churches.
The comparison with King is irresistible but it will stretch only so far. King’s language is biblical and showy: Asiatic in the ancient currency. Obama’s is Attic; simple and plain. Read a speech by Dr King out for yourself and you can electrify the air. It’s not as easy to do with a text by Obama. You can’t say it like he does. The case he is making – about the liberty of a nation under democratic government – contains a quiet beauty, but it takes Barack Obama to really make it sing.
But despite all our differences, most of us share certain hopes for America’s future. We want our kids to grow up in a country where they have access to the best schools and the best teachers. A country that lives up to its legacy as the global leader in technology and discovery and innovation, with all the good jobs and new businesses that follow. We want our children to live in an America that isn’t burdened by debt, that isn’t weakened by inequality, that isn’t threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet. We want to pass on a country that’s safe and respected and admired around the world, a nation that is defended by the strongest military on earth and the best troops this world has ever known. But also a country that moves with confidence beyond this time of war, to shape a peace that is built on the promise of freedom and dignity for every human being. We believe in a generous America, in a compassionate America, in a tolerant America, open to the dreams of an immigrant’s daughter who studies in our schools and pledges to our flag. To the young boy on the south side of Chicago who sees a life beyond the nearest street corner. To the furniture worker’s child in North Carolina who wants to become a doctor or a scientist, an engineer or an entrepreneur, a diplomat or even a president – that’s the future we hope for. That’s the vision we share. That’s where we need to go – forward. That’s where we need to go. Now, we will disagree, sometimes fiercely, about how to get there. As it has for more than two centuries, progress will come in fits and starts. It’s not always a straight line. It’s not always a smooth path. By itself, the recognition that we have common hopes and dreams won’t end all the gridlock or solve all our problems or substitute for the painstaking work of building consensus and making the difficult compromises needed to move this country forward. But that common bond is where we must begin.
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
