From poetry to prose

24 January 2009

The Spectator on Barack Obama's inauguration

It is a rich irony that the true audacity of President Obama’s inaugural address was its dampening of hope. Having campaigned under a banner emblazoned with the slogan ‘Yes We Can’, the 44th President’s first act of government was to administer a stiff dose of realism. He had been expected, with good reason, to emulate the sonorous rhetoric of Lincoln. But the presiding spirit of this speech was George Washington, who spoke in his own first inaugural address in 1789 of his ‘great anxieties’ and ‘the magnitude and difficulty of the trust to which the voice of my country called me’.

One of the most striking passages of President Obama’s speech was his invocation of the text Washington ordered to be read to desolate American revolutionaries camping in the cold in 1776: ‘Let it be told to the future world...that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive...that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it].’ Thus did the new Commander-in-Chief seek to import the spirit of the American Revolution to his own era and, specifically, his response to the economic crisis that will do so much to define his presidency.

If the theme of the speech was the ‘remaking of America’, its deepest cunning was its quarrying of the past and self-conscious traditionalism. For all the obvious echoes of John F. Kennedy, and the epochal symbolism of a black man taking the presidential oath, there was no passing of the torch, no explicit supplanting of one generation by another. Rather, the new President rooted his rhetoric in the inspiration of the past: the first rugged colonists, the Founding Fathers, those who fought at Concord and Gettysburg, ‘the fallen heroes who lie in Arlington’. He invited the American people not to rebel against the past, but to act as ‘keepers of this legacy.’ There was more memory in this speech than portentous futurism.

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