Sweet Nothings
FERGUSON, ANDREW
Sweet Nothings A close reading of The Speech. BY ANDREW FERGUSON Anyone who wants to understand Barack Obama would do well to stay away from the radio and the TV. Obama is a theatrical...
...You get the idea that the urgency doesn’t arise from an assessment of reality but from a rhetorical need...
...The thing about wars, even cold ones, is that the world doesn’t stand as one...
...Go ahead: Argue...
...Obama’s “nothing” is sometimes interesting anyway...
...So last Friday, having missed the television broadcasts of Obama’s speech in Berlin the day before, I read the Washington Post with a cocked ear, and when I saw that the speech was described as “broadly thematic” and “sober and serious” I knew exactly what it meant: a boring speech full of blah blah blah...
...He declined to get specifi c, aside from urging us to “answer the call...
...A terrorist setting off a nuclear bomb in London—that’s a danger...
...As a public fi gure he means to rise above any hint of confl ict, and to suggest that problems and dangers dissolve when we “come together...
...When his handlers decided to schedule a speech in Berlin, they teed up comparisons with the portentous speeches that Presidents Kennedy and Reagan had delivered there...
...Instead he hustled on to the present moment...
...You really need to be on your toes if you’re going to get anything out of a newspaper’s election coverage...
...He began the speech, as he often does, with a summary of his own life history, which elided into a history of the Cold War—mixing the two together, with his customary grandiosity...
...Instead, in the heart of Europe, before 200,000 breathless admirers, Obama pulled himself up to his full height, lifted his chin, unlimbered those eloquent hands, and said nothing at all...
...That’s what it means to be “charismatic”: To an unnerving degree his appeal relies on sight and sound rather than sense...
...You’ve got to tune your ear to euphemism and translate as you go...
...Better, in my opinion, to stick to the printed word...
...Roger...
...But think it through: “New walls to divide us” is just a metaphor, a trope...
...Now is the time to build new bridges...
...Included in the latter are terrorism, global warming, and nuclear proliferation...
...And what will Obama have us do to avoid those nonmetaphorical dangers...
...So if “standing as one” didn’t win the Cold War, what did...
...True dat...
...All set to go...
...What’s the rush...
...Obama didn’t stop to answer, since his own reading of history seems to deny the premise of the question...
...This is surely part of his appeal...
...The greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us from one another...
...Now, he said, “we are called upon again...
...It doesn’t matter that human affairs never work out this way, no more in domestic politics than in foreign policy...
...Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...And in the Cold War the Soviet side was as united as the West...
...He’s got to keep the folks on their toes somehow...
...And coming together, “standing as one,” is simply the logical outcome of every participant’s correctly understanding his best interest...
...The assumption that they do is what lends so many of Obama’s utterances their greeting-card simplicity and appeal...
...Obama couldn’t come to Berlin and deliver a speech full of portent, as Reagan and Kennedy did before him, and as his publicists suggested he might...
...But those perils aren’t the worst of it...
...A trope can’t be the “greatest danger of all...
...And the lesson he drew from it was, to be kind, idiosyncratic: The West’s victory in the Cold War, he said, proved that “there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one...
...A fi gure of speech is just a fi gure of speech...
...A revolution in Islamabad— that’s a danger...
...Check...
...Probably a fair number of the older members of Obama’s audience had been hoisting those banners themselves 25 years ago...
...Floating along on a cloud of metaphor and generality allows Obama to do what he wants to do, in the Berlin speech and elsewhere...
...The printed word has its problems too, of course...
...The sentence is the heart of the speech and an instance of Obama’s big weakness—his preference for the rhetorical fl ourish over a realistic account of things as they are...
...And so it was...
...Presumably to stand as one all over again, in the face of “new promise and new peril...
...The paper didn’t even bother to print verbatim excerpts, as it usually does with a big-time address...
...more so, probably...
...there are pointers in the vacuousness, as I saw when I read the full text on his campaign’s website...
...This will come as a surprise to anyone who lived through the Cold War or has even read about it...
...Every nation in Europe must have the chance to choose its own tomorrow free from the shadows of yesterday...
...It’s not surprising that when he came to Berlin and said nothing at all, none of his admirers seemed disappointed...
...You can understand him at your own pace, undistracted by that rich baritone, the regal bearing, the excellent drape of his Burberry suits...
...The occasion had been taken as an invitation to deliver a summary of Obama’s view of America’s role in the world...
...For all the talk about this being our time and us being the people, Obama shows no sign of really believing we live in portentous times...
...Left out of Obama’s history was any mention of the ferocious demonstrations against the United States in the streets of Paris and West Berlin during the 1960s and 1980s, when American presidents were routinely depicted as priapic cowboys and psychopaths...
...To pump a little vigor into his limp sentiments, Obama attached them to a hypnotic refrain...
...This is the moment,” he said in Berlin, repeatedly...
...that’s why there’s a war...
...In the Post as elsewhere, as much coverage was devoted to the speech’s setting—the sprawling crowds and the dramatic backdrop and the tingling sense of anticipation—as to the speech itself...
...In the long train of platitudes he suggested no discrete, defi nable policy that needed to be adopted urgently, beyond his call to unity, which isn’t a policy but an aspiration...
...The effect is almost soporifi c: “America cannot turn inward,” he says...
...After eight years of overheated history, nothing comes as a relief...
...What could be more reasonable...
...On paper (or the computer screen) his words can be thought about and chewed over...
...But where’s the urgency come from...
...We must help answer the call for a new dawn in the Middle East...
...Most politicians share the weakness, and the preference has proved wildly attractive to Obama’s supporters...
...To do what...
...The history was nicely written up but not news...
...We must defeat terror...
...Obama is a theatrical presence...
Vol. 13 • August 2008 • No. 44
