Change & Decay In All Around I See

Wednesday 19 November 2008, 7:43PM

James Wood on Barack Obama

Image sourced from Barack Obama's Flickr photo gallery

Barack Obama’s skill with words is, I think, the key to his election victory. Clearly issues such as the economy were fundamental, but Obama’s policies were not all that different from his rivals for the Democratic nomination. It’s his ability to inspire and connect through his exceptional rhetorical gifts that won him his party’s nomination, which in retrospect was harder than his battle against the Republicans.

He’s written two well received books, and delivered many powerful speeches through the primary and presidential campaigns. I’m thinking in particular of the address A More Perfect Union, given just after the Jeremiah Wright rumpus back in the Spring - it really is very fine. So I was interested to notice that James Wood, one of the best contemporary literary critics, has written an analysis of Obama’s election night speech for the New Yorker.

Wood’s close reading shows just how thoroughly Obama has absorbed and mastered the classic rhetoric of the US political tradition: Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King et al. Rather than simply quoting passages, Obama has studied the imagery, cadence and metaphor employed by the best of his predecessors, and is able to weave the rhetorical devices they developed seamlessly into the texture of his own words. It’s so subtle that it takes an expert reader such as Wood to note and bring to light all of the nuances. For example, Obama’s injunction that “we put our hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day” is a striking image, but built on a metaphor from King’s last speech. Behind many other parts of the speech, as Wood puts it, are the “ghosts” of Lincoln’s First and Second Inaugural addresses, and the Gettysburg Address.

Unless you are truly steeped in American political history you’ll miss most of this. I’m certainly not, and am grateful to Wood for helping to illuminate important sources of Obama’s ability with words: it’s not just inspiration, but skillful rhetoric crafted using tried and trusted literary devices handed down from his political predecessors.