BOOK OF THE WEEK:
The Inaugural Address 2009. By Barack Obama. Penguin, 98pp, £7.
Together with Abraham Lincoln's First and Second Inaugural Addresses and The Gettysburg Address and Ralph Waldo Emerson's Self Reliance.
AS FIVE o’clock approached on the day of President Obama’s inaugural, colleagues began drifting into my office. People found seats where they could, and the television was turned up.
There was an unspoken animation in the room. Here indeed was hope and history intertwined. A half-forgotten bottle was produced, some dusty glasses rinsed off, and a toast – Yes We Can! The oath was taken, and then the speech began.
At which point, a more detached professional curiosity entered the room. We all knew Obama could perform. I had been in the stadium in Denver for his convention speech. Colleagues had been in Grant Park, Chicago, on election night. No one doubted Obama was a masterful orator. But the test now was whether Obama the candidate could become Obama the president.
I have to admit that, at first, I was disappointed. It wasn’t the content, so much as the delivery. It sounded too much like the stump speech – a formula repeated dozens and dozens of times on the election trail. But then he came to the foreign policy section, and suddenly the speech took off.
“As for our common defence, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.” He declared America ready to befriend “each nation . . . not just with missiles and tanks but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions”. He spoke directly to “the Muslim world” and to “the people of poor nations”. This was more than just talking to the people who elected him – this was sending a signal to the world that the Bush era of neo-conservatism and unilateralism was over.
He didn’t look back. The tone was more and more authoritative. You could almost see the transformation from candidate to president over the course of the speech. Not in what he said, but in the way that he said it.
Interestingly, reading the text of the speech now gives a different perspective. That first section resonates more strongly than the final third, particularly for an Irish audience, given where we find ourselves. Obama speaks of “a nagging fear that America’s decline is inevitable, that the next generation must lower its sights”. Where have I heard that before! He assures his audience that the challenge will be met. He repeats the idea that American history is one of each generation building something greater for the next, often against great adversity.
In one striking passage he declares: “Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished. But the time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions – that time has surely passed. Starting today we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again.”
This attractive book includes a number of companion texts. Obama’s interest in Lincoln is well known, and, re-reading the Gettysburg address, you can see a Lincolnesque quality to the Obama inaugural. Indeed, it has been suggested that his cabinet selections were inspired by Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book, Team of Rivals, which tells how Lincoln united the Republican Party by including his defeated rivals for the Republican nomination in his cabinet, and kept them there, despite sore provocation.
Eamon Gilmore is leader of the Labour Party. A selection of his speeches can be found on www.labour.ie/press