When They Go Low, We Go High: Speeches that shape the world – and why we need them. Philip Collins
of Soviet intermediate-range nuclear missiles on Cuba. It is, though, the speech that is best remembered. The line it is remembered for is this one. It is the naming of popular power that makes it memorable. Kennedy gets into a magnificent rhetorical phrase one of the great insights into democratic politics, which is that it needs an active citizen body. It is the conclusion to a different speech, if we want to be fastidious about the structure. It is a brilliant conclusion nonetheless.
BARACK OBAMA
I Have Never Been More Hopeful about America
Grant Park, Chicago
7 November 2012
No matter what he achieved in office, Barack Obama changed the world simply by who he was. The forty-fourth president of the United States was the first black leader of a nation no more than a generation after it had been segregated by race. The shock proved too much for some opponents who confected a conspiracy that Obama was not actually American, a nonsense ended by the production of his birth certificate. More than any American leader since John F. Kennedy, Obama embodied, and spoke about, the idea of hope. Even more than Kennedy he owed his elevation in politics to the pitch and power of his rhetoric. In an age when oratory was deemed to have collapsed into stock phrases, Obama rescued the trade.
Barack Obama was born on 4 August 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii, to a Kenyan intellectual and a white teenager from Kansas. After briefly living in Indonesia, he was raised by his grandparents in Hawaii. He studied law at Columbia and Harvard and worked as a civil rights lawyer in Chicago. Obama’s political break came in 1996 with a seat in the Illinois state senate, followed by a US Senate seat in 2004. His book The Audacity of Hope, which prefigures many of the themes expressed in his speeches, became a best-seller. Political aficionados had spotted his rhetorical brilliance, but it was still somehow from nowhere that he ran, in 2008, a flawless campaign to beat Hillary Clinton to the Democratic presidential nomination. In a nod to the classical origins of the American Republic, Obama accepted the Democratic nomination in front of a reconstruction of a Roman forum.
It is as yet early to assess Obama’s legacy as president, especially on foreign affairs, on which he was elected to pull America back from engagement. On this basis he was awarded a premature Nobel Peace Prize in 2009. As most presidents do, he found the world came to him even if he had not invited it in. Obama’s domestic record may stand the scrutiny of time. The American economy recovered on his watch from the financial crisis of 2008, but his claim to political memory is the Affordable Health Care Act. Every Democrat president has promised universal health care for America. Every one before Barack Obama failed to put anything into statute; Obama did. If even a cover version of his legislation survives its assault by his successor, Obama will be remembered as the Democrat who succeeded.
Tonight, more than two hundred years after a former colony won the right to determine its own destiny, the task of perfecting our union moves forward. It moves forward because of you. It moves forward because you reaffirmed the spirit that has triumphed over war and depression, the spirit that has lifted this country from the depths of despair to the great heights of hope, the belief that while each of us will pursue our own individual dreams, we are an American family and we rise or fall together as one nation and as one people. Tonight, in this election, you, the American people, reminded us that while our road has been hard, while our journey has been long, we have picked ourselves 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