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 of a wide-ranging speech is to find a theme that strings together its disparate parts. There is always a risk of contrivance; there really is nothing to link Osama bin Laden, the wrecked New Jersey shore and the Obama government’s healthcare legislation. Obama therefore makes an emotional link, stringing the speech together with mood music.
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
