Speech

I like what Thomas Friedman said about Barack Obama: that after such a long time the US will have a president who speaks English.

That is a nod to the man’s much-vaunted eloquence (set against his predecessor’s lack thereof). It is also a tribute to the power of words and the ideas they bear. The pen is, indeed, mightier than the sword.

And so it was that when Obama’s inaugural address was delivered, there was a flurry of commentaries on whether it said too little, too much or even nothing at all.

That is to be expected. The inaugural probably ranks as one of the most-watched events in the world. I was one of tens of millions in this part of the world who stayed up until the early morning watching the proceedings. The loss of sleep was more than compensated not only by the sense of being part of a great historical moment but also by the sterling performances of artists I loved: Aretha Franklin and Yo Yo Ma.

Commenting on a widely-observed speech was also the easiest thing to do. All pundits have to do is to second-guess a gesture that was already done.

And so the flurry was thick and furious. It was caused mainly by those who expected their pet concerns better amplified, and also by those who wanted to hear a greater abundance of rhetoric from someone who has displayed great skill in the art.

A single speech cannot encompass the universe of concerns. And an inaugural speech cannot be too focused on one issue: or else the world will say it was too narrow or too parochial.

Obama’s inaugural address was burdened by a new consideration: it had to be a speech to the world.

More than any previous address, this one was going to be watched across the globe in real time. It needed to resonate first with the American people, of course. But it must, at the same instance, resonate with non-Americans too.

Because of that second consideration, it cannot afford to be too engrossed with issues that are mainly domestic. Nor can it be laden with too much colloquialisms.

It must be soaring but not abstract. Remember that the actual majority of those hearing this speech through the various media are not native English speakers. They are people from Obama’s ancestral village in Kenya, intense fans from Japan, boyhood friends in Indonesia, and, yes, the Europeans who somehow feel the man is their leader too.

In the modern media environment, this unavoidably is a speech that will be listened to many time more than read. All of us heard this speech, or at least snippets of it. Very few, not me certainly, have seen the full text.

This is not an easy speech to craft. As an occasional speech-writer myself, I can very well sympathize with the work put in by Obama’s team of wordsmiths.

Good speeches are not measured just by the goal of delivering an idea clearly. There needs to be a good synergy between text and context: the speech must play well with the moment it is delivered.

The inaugural ceremony at Washington DC last Tuesday was a grand moment. Millions physically (and voluntarily) assembled at the American capital not just to hear a speech but to be part of the moment where the speech was just a component of. The speech cannot possibly overwhelm the moment and should not aspire to do that. Obama’s speech, quite wisely, did not try to overwhelm the moment.

In an open-air setting with millions hanging on to every word uttered (and amplified always imperfectly through a very long mall), the speech needed to be short and sweet. Or else the crowd would begin showing restlessness or break into a deafening chatter.

In a democracy, it is not possible to deliver the sort of seven-hour speeches that tyrants like Fidel Castro or Robert Mugabe love. These were speeches delivered to captive audiences who could not leave the venue when they wanted to, could not urinate when they needed to and could not jeer when they get annoyed.

A speech 18 minutes long was just right. A minute longer and people in the crowd would have turned on their I-pods and people watching on television would have gone off to sleep.

Remember that people did not come there to hear a speech. They came to watch a historic inauguration of the first African-American president and one from whom so much new things are expected.

In a multimedia environment, it is not really important for the speech to build an idea and argue it out. Such a polemical speech would have died on the spot. People would soon be disagreeing with the logical construction.

In such an environment, what the speech needed to deliver was a sense.

When Obama began his epic quest for the presidency, he had to contend with the sense that he was not prepared to lead. He was young, he was black, his political resume was short, his second name was Hussein.

When he delivered his inaugural address, Obama clearly left people with a sense that America had a leader. And because America has a leader, it will be capable of again leading the world.

That sense could not have been delivered with the instruments of pedantry nor in the classical rhetorical method the classical Greeks preferred and which ideologues today still employ. It could only be delivered by a properly deconstructed speech that produced the appropriate synergy of text and context.