The least understood aspect of great rhetoric is that much more is said than words. Every speaker brings a tone to their material that they could no sooner throw off than defy gravity. Tony Blair found lightness without trying. Gordon Brown cannot fail to convey solemnity, even when smiling. And Barack Obama has, to use one of his own terms, a righteous wind at his back.
It's banal, because it's too obvious, to conclude that Obama's words belong in a tradition of classical rhetoric. So does anyone speaking in complete sentences. Hazel Blears, speaking in September 2008, delivered a well-rendered use of anaphora: the repetition of vital words in a paragraph. But it is not to the discredit of Blears that she carried a fraction of the power Martin Luther King drew from the same technique in his "I Have A Dream" speech. Racial intolerance is a big subject. It's hard to get the same effect with local government reform.
The precepts of classical rhetoric help us see how the trick works. But technical competence is the only thing genius has in common with mediocrity. This will not explain why Obama has, even before his inauguration on 20th January, begun to draw level with the last century's greatest political speakers: Winston Churchill, JFK, Martin Luther King and Vaclav Havel.
Obama's rhetoric is rarely flowery. On the page it is not even especially colourful. The least successful passages, in fact, are those in which the prose turns purple. In his November victory speech, for example, Obama suggested that everyone should "put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day." The best to be said for that is that you know what he means.
But, at his strongest, Obama combines a poetic form of expression with a poetic compression of meaning, while rarely straying from ordinary language. His speeches do take wing, but the flight comes from the rhythm of the sentences, as much as the elevation of the language.
The seductive power of his voice means Obama's occasionally clunky writing evades proper critical scrutiny. The New Hampshire speech was the first outing for the "yes, we can" repeated refrain. If one of the Milibands said that—they will, they will—we'd laugh at the naivete, we'd scorn the cliché. David Lammy has made some good speeches lately, but his bid to be seen as Obama-like will not survive ridicule in Britain's more cynical political culture. Or, take another of Obama's signature phrases: is it really audacious to hope? Does it even really mean anything? Not a lot more than if it were reversed: the hope of audacity. Obama is above this critique, for now. We are judging the thinker here, not the thought, and he has a temporary dispensation from criticism.
So far, the subject of this encomium could have been Bill Clinton. But Obama is better than Clinton twice over, because he is prepared to confront tough arguments. Aristotle was the first to point out, though Cicero made the point more clearly, that no facility with words will mask the absence of a serious point of view. Clinton had an enviable way with words, but often little to say. He could leave serious issues in silence, while sometimes treating triviality to his eloquence. By contrast, even in his exultant victory speech, Obama took pains to pose real arguments. He defined the issues he will have to face: two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century.
The most confident trick in public speech, one which Gordon Brown would do well to copy, is to make opposing arguments recognisable to an advocate. Generosity in argument lends weight to denunciation, while good rhetoric is never knocking copy.
Obama's now-famous 2004 Democratic convention speech is a case in point. He acknowledges dissent, and shames it into acquiescence. It is deftly done, and worth quoting at length: "There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America. The pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states: red states for Republicans, blue states for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states. We coach little league in the blue states and, yes, we've got some gay friends in the red states."
But the best example of this intellectual toughness was the April speech in which he confronted the growing likelihood that Reverend Wright would derail his presidential campaign. The obvious thing to do was to get above the immediate issue, to wax righteously indignant at historical injustice and to deliberately court comparison with Martin Luther King. In his refusal of this obvious course, by embracing Wright and acknowledging the ugly epithets used by his own grandmother, Obama showed that great skill as a writer is wasted unless you have great courage as a speaker.
That speech mattered because the subject mattered. Barack Obama is a black man who was running for the office of president of the United States of America. That extraordinary fact means he can be eloquent without straining. If your subject is as big as this, you don't need to beg for effect.
This too, is a classical precept. Aristotle said there were three components of great rhetoric: logos, ethos and pathos. In Obama's case, the pathos of the moment is irresistible. Wilfred Owen put it well: the poetry, he said, is in the pity. A good writer is, of course, in command of the language. That much is a gift. But the moment he speaks for, that is an inheritance.
