“Hello, America,” President Obama began one Wednesday night in July, although by then we knew that it was more of a goodbye. Since rising to the national stage with a history-making convention speech 12 years ago, Obama has been identified by no quality more than his oratorical skill, his ability to bring a crowd to its feet with stirring national principle and elegiac turns of phrase. That summer evening, at the Democratic National Convention, he walked onstage dressed as he had been for his first appearance—dark suit, lighttie—and gave what may have been the finest speech of his career. To watch the original 2004 convention address now is to be struck by its youth and uncertainty: Obama’s eyes hugged the central teleprompter, and he talked quickly and nervily, sometimes rushing like an Oscar winner up against the music. The speech of this summer, by contrast, made the wages of experience clear. The President mostly hewed to his prepared script, but his phrasing had the patient flexibility of a wry wise man sitting down with an old friend. The argument was abstract and intricate, yet he seemed confident, limber, and warm. “He’s smiling throughout,” a friend texted me partway through, and it was true: For several minutes, Obama had barely broken his bright grin.
There is a notorious passage in a notorious piece of piano music: the cadenza, or virtuosic solo section, near the end of the first movement of Rachmaninoff’s third concerto. The orchestra goes silent; the soloist is alone at the front of the stage. For the next two minutes, he or she must perform one of the most nearly unplayable passages in piano literature with the brisk, stirring romance that the music requires. It is normal, even expected, for the leading virtuosos in the world to flub a few notes; Vladimir Horowitz reportedly performed the concerto all his life and yet, in footage, looks as panicked as a 7-year-old at his first recital. The best renditions caught on film (Arcadi Volodos driving through the gnarliest version, Yuja Wang playing a marginally less impossible version at great speed) share an odd feature: At some point, the performer gives a little smile. It’s a grin, it seems, of quiet confidence and secret delight; it is exactly the expression Obama wore for most of his convention speech this summer.
A lot of politicians—perhaps even most—can deliver a lucid speech very well. It has been Obama’s gift to deliver a tricky speech with the thrilling self-possession of a virtuoso, channeling sentiment without losing rigor. At the convention, he began with stump-speech standards: a précis of his party’s accomplishments, a litany of praise for the candidate, a criticism of the opposition’s platform (or, in this case, the terrifying lack of one). Then the orchestra got quiet, and Obama began an impossible-seeming feat: explaining, in a few minutes, how a unified national—even ethnic—identity could support a churning, changing, pluralistic country.
The subtle argument was typical of his extraordinary speech craft. Starting slowly, he referenced American values based on heritage—basically, the Make America Great-ers’ premise: “True things. Things that last. The things we try to teach our kids.” He suggested that those values were so strong that they transcended geographic and racial boundaries: “They could be passed down to a half-Kenyan grandson, or a half-Asian granddaughter.” In fact, he said, the values gave the U.S. its stability in difference: “What makes us American, what makes us patriots, is what’s in here. . . . That’s why we can take the food and music and holidays and styles of other countries, and blend it into something uniquely our own.” In the very spirit he was describing, he had taken the narrow, Trumpist “us” and added in the many. Then he offered a romantic turn, in the second person. “I’ll tell you what’s picked me back up, every single time. It’s been you. The American people,” the President said. “You have vindicated that hope these past eight years.”
Some political orators are called Churchillian. Obama, whose best speeches tell us who we are not only nationally but conceptually—as a people of ideals untarred by ideology—carries that tradition further. Where Churchill required a martial enemy to likely reach his finest hour, Obama has ascended in an age of difficult peace. His gift as an orator may be his rare ability to talk in nearly all the vernaculars of the nation—to be what Zadie Smith has called “a genuinely many-voiced man,” capable of translating the population’s varied dreams back to its ear. But his gift as a thinker is his ability to see the intellectual and emotional histories of this country in one long braid. On the dais, he’s repeatedly described how high principle has stumbled in practice, only to be reexamined, focussed, and made more perfect. That process of failing and improving, he has suggested again and again, is not the fate we hope in spite of. It is what we hope for. Instead of pinning dreams to bright, idealized futures, he reminds us it’s the fraught process of getting there, of falling down and moving on in a special way, that is most beautifully and crucially American.
Speeches like the one at the summer’s convention—there have been many—reach a craft standard that any fine writer would struggle to meet. It is only a small comfort to learn that, behind his calm, the President struggles, too. On the Monday before the last convention address, it was reported, he stayed up until 3:30 a.m. reworking the draft—even though his message was one he had been developing through his national career. (That first address, from 2004, had a similarly broad, impressive frame, referring to the ideas of the country’s founding and addressing the nation—“you”—as a friend.) His sense of the stakes of language seems quite deeply felt. Jon Favreau, a former speechwriter, reports that during the last run-through of another speech—accepting his party’s nomination, in 2008—Obama teared up, and had to collect himself in a hotel bathroom. The words that he was speaking meant, to him, that much.
It is hard to overstate how lucky we are to have a leader who believes that the most powerful man in the world should stay up into the wee hours, working over a text word by word, because of what artful sentences can do: Obama’s ability to project to hundreds of millions of people, without effacing their differences, makes him not only a rare politician, but a rare president. And it is jarring to imagine how different, in this sense alone, the next four years will be. Our president-elect is often not eloquent: When he speaks extemporaneously, he typically offers a barrage of vague, repetitious sentence fragments filled with broad-brush peculiarities (“the cyber”); when he works from prepared remarks, he adds responsive commentary (“So true!”). He rarely smiles, except in sarcasm; his sense of our shared history does not appear to reach past 1946. He seems to have no conceptual image of America, no belief in the ideas that make it special. It now feels like a long time since Obama’s “hello” at that convention. But many of us will be hoping time slows further—long enough to hear some final strains of music we can carry beyond his goodbye.
This is the eighth installment of a 12-part series celebrating the legacy of President Obama and his administration. Read the seventh installment here.
