Daniel Henninger: Obama and the Speech - WSJ.com

Daniel Henninger: Obama and the Speech - WSJ.com

Can Barack Obama talk his way onto Mount Rushmore? He might. In fact, if just half of what Mr. Obama has said that he, we or the world should do comes to pass, he's going straight to that mountain.

More than any U.S. president, The Speech is the primary vehicle of Barack Obama's politics. Web sites have been erected as shrines to his speeches. Obamaspeech.com offers the text of 100 Obama speeches back to 2002. The electronic library stops at January 2009, when the White House site takes over. Currently it's up to 36 pages listing the titles alone of the president's remarks and speeches.

Six months into his presidency, with more surely to come, it is an appropriate moment to ask: What is the point and purpose of Barack Obama's speeches?



One answer -- offered by students of talk from Aristotle through Alfred North Whitehead -- is obvious: The purpose of the rhetorician's art is to persuade. John Locke, watching democracy's advance, had a darker view; rhetoric, said Locke, is an instrument of error and deceit. Or both: talking people into error.

In our time, public remarks remain first of all a photo-op to make a president glow in public. Mr. Obama is taking it to another level, making the public speech the central act of his presidency.

On his just-completed foreign trip, he gave a major address in Moscow reinterpreting the Cold War and another in Ghana laying out a persuasive path to prosperity for the African continent. In June he gave a major speech on Islam's place in history and its relationship to the rest of the world, spoke the next day at length on the meaning of Buchenwald and a day later about D-Day at Normandy. He seems to be on TV every day, talking.

The first thing to be said about this body of work is that it is astonishingly good. Even by the something-for-everyone standards of political speech, much of Mr. Obama's somethings are strong and worth hearing.

Here's the problem: Mr. Obama is not the nation's Speaker in Chief. He's not a senator, and he's no longer a candidate. He's the president. A president's major speeches are different than those of anyone else. That high office imposes demands beyond the power of a podium. Inspiration matters, but the office also requires acts of leadership. A U.S. president's words must be connected to something beyond sentiment and eloquence. Too much of the time, Barack Obama's big speeches don't seem to be connected to anything other than his own interesting thoughts on some subject.

Lincoln's eloquence flowed from the pain of the Civil War. Washington's Farewell Address, perhaps America's greatest political speech, was a magisterial summing up after leading an army to victory in the Revolution and then the nation's beginning. FDR's remembered speeches were pushed into life by the Depression and then world war.

Ronald Reagan's great "tear down this wall" speech in 1987 at the Brandenburg Gate was just one piece in an elaborate Cold War endgame strategy.

LBJ's most famous speech, to a full session of Congress in 1965 a week after the violent civil-rights march in Selma, wasn't just a reflection on civil rights in America but itself a central event.

With one notable exception -- health care -- there is a disconnect between the scale of Mr. Obama's ideas and his actions, and sometimes even reality, as when he says a U.S-Russian commitment to a world without nuclear weapons would be the "legal and moral foundation" for persuading the world's rogues to do the same. What, exactly, comes after the moral foundation?

The Russian "reset" isn't a foreign-policy statement; it's a sentiment. If you were the head of an Islamic nation, what policy conclusion were you supposed to take from that Cairo speech? All past administrations have been willing to talk to adversaries. When he speaks as president, Mr. Obama's audiences have reason to expect that some concrete actions or policies will flow from seemingly major statements. Other than more diplomats talking, I don't think much of anything is going to follow these. The Speech was pretty much it.

Then there is health care. With characteristic eloquence, Mr. Obama defended his federal health-insurance entitlement for the middle class in a major speech to the American Medical Association. If enacted, Mr. Obama's plan would be the most significant piece of social entitlement legislation since 1965, the year Medicare and Medicaid were enacted as the cornerstone of the Great Society.

It may well be that this in fact is the foundation on which Barack Obama intends to build his own vast social vision. If so he will be doing it with no real event or trauma to drive a policy of this scale -- no war, no civil-rights movement. Instead, he is trying to shape a presidency from the force of his own political personality carved out of a mountain of random eloquence. It might work, too.