President Obama

I watched the Inauguration. I was happy to watch from my living room rather than a mile deep on the Mall. Tuesday was a meaningful day, but its meaning was not to be found in what was said or done. It was in what was happening independently of prayers or songs or speeches. It was simply in those people configured in that way at that place.

I’d like to reflect for a moment, though, on what Obama himself said. I don’t think – as many apparently do – that it was a great speech. In fact, I thought it wasn’t particularly good, and certainly not among the top five speeches of Obama’s short political career. Some commentators said it wasn’t soaring. But it was, at least in parts. The problem is that those parts were tired and heavy-handed. For example:

Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath. The words have been spoken during rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace. Yet, every so often, the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms.

I have a difficult time imagining a staler metaphor than water imagery for the purposes of discussing national well-being. And to talk about turmoil via images of clouds and storms is, well, amateurish. The speech seemed to have been written by someone who detests soaring metaphor but felt compelled to include moments of it in an inaugural for fear of earning a historical reputation as a lightweight. Or by a 27-year-old.

In one sense, the speech was remarkable: given in front of a unanimously hated president, the speech constituted in large part a wholesale rebuke of Bush doctrine and dogmatism. Nevertheless, the speech continued the trend of most of Obama’s speeches since election night: it was joyless and workmanlike. It didn’t need more soaring rhetoric; it needed some old-fashioned exuberance.

This feature of Obama’s speeches of late is not unrelated to his manner during press conferences: there he is circumspect and vague, unwilling to appear overly enthusiastic for his own proposals. And he won’t let himself out on any sort of a limb. For all the extraordinary carefulness of the campaign, this isn’t surprising. It’s not really even a criticism. But it’s a little disappointing.

Still, I don’t think we should be worried. Guarded as he has been, his first week in office belies neither incrementalism nor a particularly vile version of centrism, which is what his public appearances and decisions before the inauguration had made some of us fear. On his first full day in office, Obama committed not only to closing Guantanamo, but to suspending military commissions and to closing secret CIA prisons worldwide. A less bold man would have waited. Or done only one of these things. Appearances perhaps to the contrary, Obama is in fact a daring leader, unafraid of committing himself to drastic and sweeping change. Perhaps he has his reasons for refusing to seem to be so at each appearance. Or perhaps we just need to look harder:

In this little-noticed speech to a summit on climate-change in California a mere two weeks after the election, Obama is confident and bold, declaring in no uncertain terms that the era of denial is over. He sets out his plan in detail (or as much as one could hope for at that point), but he also is unafraid to talk about the problem in grand, even fatalistic terms. This is the Obama we’ve been waiting for after all.

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