Oratorical Animal

A Nice Speech

Every once in a while, as I do this job, I run across a speech I simply like. President Obama's address to the Parliament in London yesterday is one of those efforts. I doubt I'll ever write an academic essay about it nor do I think it tells us something new about public address. But it's a good speech, an appealing one. For someone teaching US foreign policy rhetoric, there might be a nice little unit on the "special relationship" between Great Britain and the United States, using Winston Churchill's December 1941address to a joint session of Congress and Obama's speecch.

Why do I like it? For one thing, it's funny. The jokes actually work, which is rare for a political speech. For instance, Obama said, "I am told that the last three speakers here have been the Pope, Her Majesty the Queen, and Nelson Mandela--which is either a very high bar or the beginning of a very funny joke." For another, Obama again nicely structures the address--past successes lead to future challenges solved by timeless values. And, of course, the president nicely weaves together English and American allusions, performing our special relationship even as he asserts it.

But what may be politically interesting about this speech is the way in which President Obama is slowly but surely developing a full-throated narrative defense of the liberal tradition. In both his recent budget speech and in this one, he begins with consensual values, "Adam Smith's central insight remains true today. There is no greater generator of wealth and innovation than a system of free enterprise that unleashes the potential of individual men and women." Stretching that insight across time and space, he argues that it has worked throughout the past two centuries and across the globe.

But it works best when we include all people, when we invest in education, when we guard against market failures, when we work together for a paceful world, and when we uphold human rights. I've expressed gthese claims much less naturally than he does; the narrative flow he creates encompasses these concerns very well. They flow naturally from the consensus he's identified. 

Equally important, there's always a cutting edge. For instance, the president is determined to include all peoples in his vision. So, he credits the traditional heroes of the Anglo-American narrative in the speech, but at the beginning, he features--strongly--somewhat different founders than is the norm: "For both of our nations, living up to the ideals enshrined in these founding documents has sometimes been difficult, has always been a work in progress. The path has never been perfect. But through the struggles of slaves and immigrants, women and ethnic minorities, former colonies and persecuted religions, we have learned better than most that the longing for freedom and human dignity is not English or American or Western--it is universal and it beats in every heart."

To put this metaphorically, these are Reagan's words and King's music, melded to make something new and interesting. He extolls liberal values, but argues those traditionally on the outside have done the most to make those ideals real in the history of the two nations.

Similarly, at the end of the address, he acknowledges that "our diversity can lead to tension." There've been hard debates about immigration and assimilation, but "we fundamentally recognize that our patchwork heritage is an enormous strength--that in a world which will only grow smaller and more interconnected, the example of our two nations says it possible for people to be united in their ideals, instead of divided by their differences; that it's possible for hearts to change and old hatreds to pass; that it's possible for the sons and daughters of former colonies to sit here as members of this great Parliament, and for the grandson of a Kenyan who served as a cook in the British Army to stand before you as President of the United States."

Very nice--he establishes diversity as the fundamental strength of both nations, represented in our narrative history--the earlier quotation--and in our present circumstance--the later quotation. That diversity is both practical--a strength as the world becomes more interconnected (imitating US/UK)--and ideal--hearts heal and hatreds pass. All of that, then, is represented by the histories of these two nations and embodied in the person of the President--much as the special relationship was embodied in the person of Churchill (American mother, English father) as he explicitly noted in his 1941 speech before Congress. The very strategy used enacts the special relationship while also rooting that relationship in liberal values.

This is a good speech. It also shows that the president is nicely warming up for the coming election.

Prime Minister Netanyahu's 2002 Address to Congress, which

unfortunately for him, he gave in 2011. The Prime Minister's address today was an unusually powerful demonstration of the importance of kairos or timing in rhetorical action. A concept drawn from the ancient Greek, kairos as a term tries to comprehend the role of time in public address--how do we characterize the times we are in? When should one intervene in a public debate? How does the flow of time shape rhetorical appeals and arguments?

In the case of Netanyahu, hardly at all. Although the Congress hung rapt on his every word, that is not an effect that is likely to last. That's primarily because his speech reflected assumptions that may have been "true"--in the sense that they served nicely as premises for public argument--in the halcyon (for neocons) days following 9/11, but no longer hold much water. So, Netanyahu's speech claimed

1) An absolute identification between the values and interests of the United States and the values and interests of Israel. Again, many Americans may have accepted this claim in the months following 9/11, but it was not likely true then and not likely true now. For instance, a peace settlement would do much to improve the situation of the United States in the region; given the conditions Netanyahu sets, he clearly wants to continue an indefinite occupation of much of the West Bank. The time is fast approaching when that conflict in interests will become impossible to ignore.

2) An absolute identification between the values of democracy and the existing norms of Israel and the United States. I have no doubt the United States and Israel approximate those ideals better than many nations. I also understand that, as Reinhold Niebuhr put it, "imperialism is the collective expression of the sinful will-to-power which characterizes all human existence." Our hands are not clean and neither are Israel's. Netanyahu's speech assumes an absolute purity on the part of the United States and Israel that has no foundation in historical experience. It is the same blindness that afflicted the Bush Administration--we can bring democracy to the region because we are pure.

3) An absolute division between good and evil in the region. Netanyahu tries to embrace the continuing democratic movements in the area. But, after a brief acknowledgement of their potential, he offers the example of Iran. Built into the text is the assumption that his adversaries in the region simply can't be democratic, unless they live under the tutelage of Israel. Other than that, they will inevitably, it seems, slip into authoritarianism. Thus, we should pay no attention to those democracies emerging from behind the curtain. They mean nothing.

This is a speech that offers a Manichean world, a twilight struggle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness, and a victory that can only be won by an endless, rigid determination--by a supreme exertion of will. It is, in short, a speech that could have been given by former Vice-President Richard Cheney. It is not an address that reflects the times in which we live. For that, I am very sad because I suspect the Prime Minister's leadership will take the nation he loves into very bad times, indeed.

Audience Adaptation and Foreign Policy Rhetoric

President Obama's speech yesterday interests me on any number of levels, but it's a nice illustration of a persistent problem faced by presidents when they make a major foreign policy statement: Who is the audience? On the one hand, a president needs the support of the American people to pursue his goals abroad. On the other hand, he also needs to persuade key actors abroad to support his goals. These  audiences often have little in common or actively oppose one another. Two key tensions/strategies in Obama's address yesterday nicely make this point.

First, as he so often does, the president begins with history. Initially, he briefly recounts the history of his administration, a narrative with a dissociative purpose--he is again differentiating his policy from that of George W. Bush. More important, however, is an early paragraph that leads into a history of the region. Obama argues there "are times in the course of history when the actions of ordinary citizens spark movements for change because they speak to a longing for freedom that has been building up for years." He then notes that, in "America," we "think of of the defiance of those patriots in Boston who refused to pay taxes to a King, or the dignity of Rosa Parks as she sat courageously in her seat. So it was in Tunisia..." From there, he moves into the history of the region and its freedom movements.

A couple of points. Initially, and despite later caveats ("It's not America that put people into the streets of Tunis or Cairo"), the president serially links these moments, implying causation although none exists--the Tea Party (there's our ironic president) to Rosa Parks to the young Tunisian vendor Mohammed Bouazizi. This is the sequential fallacy; sequence does not mean causation or inspiration. Next, and despite his dismissal of Bush, the first line could have come directly from the former president's late and entirely unlamented Second Inaugural, right down to the fire imagery and the "freedom" god term. Ick. Not a good way to dissociate your approach from that of Bush.

My larger point is this: Obama's history in this address is preeminently an American history, designed for an American audience. It speaks of American values and heroes. He leaves out what those in, for instance, the Arab world might consider a more relevant narrative--the story of US interference in or dominance of the region. Simply to limit that to the postwar world, we'd have to include Truman's recognition of Israel, Eisenhower's deployment to Lebanon and management of the Suez crisis, the supply of Israel in various wars, Reagan's deployment to Lebanon, 3 US wars, support for the Shah of Iran and more. I'm not saying Obama should have recounted all of this; I am saying that his use of history reveals a powerful tension. He says he wishes to speak to the peoples of the region, but his use of history reveals a preoccupation with his American audience.

Second, the same tension suffuses issues of what critics would call agency or, in straightforward terms, Obama's implicit construction of US power--are we able to achieve our goals? And, if so, how? On the one hand, the president, consistent with his Neibuhrian leanings, emphasizes the fact that "we must proceed with a sense of humility." Such leanings come through again as he seeks to balance our "core interests" with the fact that "narrow pursuit of these interests will not fill an empty stomach or allow someone to speak their mind." He understands that interests alone will not do because nations "held together by fear and repression may offer the illusion of stability for a time, but they are built upon fault lines that will eventually tear asunder." In short, Right makes Might--we must pursue our interests but those interests are best served through a simultaneous invocation of democratic values. Only democracies are reliable partners in the long run. Such has been the view of liberal internationalism at least since Wilson, with the acknowledgement of evil and hard choices added in during the Cold War by presidents such as Truman and Kennedy and theorists such as Reinhold Neibuhr. The best way to act is with humility, articulating our values but understanding that we cannot impose them on others: "Not every country will follow our particular form of representative democracy, and there will be times our short term interests don't align perfectly with our long term vision." Nothing is simple.

On the other hand, the president feels comfortable justifying violence against Qaddafi and, in quite the imperative paragraph, telling President Assad of Syria just what he has to do over the next few weeks. Bahrain should also shape up and the Iranians are hypocrites. Again, I'm not disagreeing with Obama's positions--I'm pointing out the tension that exists between a call for humility and orders to Assad. The former plays well to the region; the latter plays well at home. President Assad probably doesn't have many friends in the region, but they've also probably had quite enough of the United States imposing its will on various nations.

These two concerns are related, of course. Any narrative history that features American freedom struggles as central to world history will also constitute American choices as the best choices. The president's speech yesterday clearly targeted, whether he meant to or not, an American audience.

I'm not sure that was the best choice, but I also realize that it's rare for a president or a major public figure to balance these concerns effectively, or to constitute democratic values while acknowledging American shortcomings. I think the best example of such an effort was Robert Kennedy's 1966 Day of Affirmation Address in South Africa. The president did not meet that standard yesterday.