Pre-Inauguration Thoughts

The best moment comes at 2:50--"fear itself."

As we draw ever closer to an inauguration that every newscaster and every other kind of commentator has insisted is “historic,” I also feel compelled to give my comments.
Bottom line: It does not excite me. I have not ever and still do not “get” what everyone sees in Barack Obama. While I do believe he possesses the intelligence and political savvy to make an effective president, I just do not see him as any kind of political messiah or in any way particularly different than any other politician. The rules of a post-racial-discrimination world tell us to completely ignore skin color and focus instead on the intangibles. Well, completely ignoring the fact that Obama is African-American, I see nothing spectacular about him. And while so many people have lauded the intangibles of Obama (“there’s just something about him”), I remain completely unconvinced that he has that special something that lifts the great statesmen of history above the level of piddling, career minded politicians.
You may say that I am, at the tender age of 21, already jaded. When I look at my generation, I do think they look awfully cold (50 points for anyone who recognizes that allusion) and cynical. Perhaps my upper middle class upbringing has deafened me to Obama’s appeal to the disadvantaged masses (the whole idea of “disadvantaged,” of course, is highly debatable).
But consider this. Listening to the video above, I got chills down my spine. Then I listened to Sir Winston Churchill’s “Their Finest Hour” speech. It seriously made me start crying. Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill just happen to be my favorite statesmen of all history, and coincidentally, they possessed something frequently attributed to Obama: the gift of rhetoric—the ability to make thousands of people hang on every word and to actually change hearts and lives through the sheer power of the spoken word. Now, I have to disagree with those who attribute to Obama that singular gift. I keep waiting to hear the magical Obama incantation. But nothing Obama has ever said has moved me or touched upon that mysterious place somewhere deep in my heart.
And I am not over-intellectualizing here. I can put aside all the criticisms of Roosevelt—the philandering, the internment camps, the creation of the modern welfare state—and Churchill—the outdated Empire mongering—and judge them purely on their ability to create a personal, visceral connection with every single listener. I regularly try to put aside any pre-conceived notions I have about Obama and focus purely on the pauses, the flickering glances, the timbre of the voice, and the commitment to the moment. Most times I wish I could tell Obama something like, “Once more, with feeling.” A dozen seasoned speech writers may have punched out those speeches, but something in Obama’s actual delivery of the carefully weighted words gets lost in translation.
Of course, desperate times bring out the best in men, and Roosevelt and Churchill certainly saw the most desperate hours of their respective countries. Three of Churchill’s best speeches, “Blood, toil, sweat and tears,” “We will fight on the beaches,” and “Their finest hour” sound eerily similar to those encouraging, bolstering, inspiring battlefield speeches in Lord of the Rings and Braveheart (seriously, look them up). Of course I look at the rhetoric of these two great men within that rhetoric’s context. And while I myself have felt the bite of depression over the sordid state of the world, I haven’t yet seen Obama’s speaking rise to the level of the current crisis. Desperate times require desperate measures, and while millions of Americans no doubt feel that desperation, I do not detect any kind of emotion other than his usual cucumber coolness in Obama’s voice or demeanor.
And while the media constantly remind us of Obama’s extraordinary personal history, I haven’t heard him really connect to any kind of personal struggle in his speeches. Yet I find it absolutely fascinating that in the inaugural address above, Roosevelt chose to characterize fear as “paralyzing;” when he said those words he stood on leg braces supporting his paralyzed legs. Of course, the American public did not know the extent of FDR’s paralysis, but using that word possibly allowed him to connect to the rest of the words—to give just the right inflection to the word “fear” that allowed the American public to believe that he truly understood fear.
So before you partake in the endless coverage on Tuesday, take a listen to FDR’s first inauguration speech and consider, in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the true power of language.