Obama's Speech and the Burden of History

Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images Expectations for Obama’s address today are nothing short of extraordinary, as he prepares for a speech that could be remembered alongside the Gettysburg Address and FDR’s Fireside Chats.

How do you talk to a nation? How do you talk to a people beset by fear but beguiled by the impossible expectations a new leader arouses—as Abraham Lincoln had to do on the bloodiest battlefield of the Civil War, Franklin Roosevelt in the darkest gloom of the Great Depression, and Winston Churchill when Britain was alone in 1940.

There is huge expectancy for the inaugural address today by the 44th president of the United States, more significantly America’s first black president (well, strictly speaking, half-black).

In his Fireside Chats, FDR spoke to some 60 million or more Americans as if he were confiding frankly to a single friend.

We know President Barack Hussein Obama has a rich baritone. Lincoln had a thin piping voice that didn’t carry—but that didn’t matter. What carried into history were the words he himself wrote and read—without a teleprompter. Since the advent of amplifiers, radio and television voices have mattered. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s voice wouldn’t have scared a sparrow hawk. Churchill had no better news for the British than Chamberlain, but his growling imperatives evoked the spirit of St. Crispin’s Day. We know Obama is a very fine writer and one more sympathetic to the rules of syntax than his immediate predecessor, whose ability to murder the language we misunderestimated. We know, too, Obama is unlike George W. Bush in that he can rouse emotional multitudes with his classical oratory permeated with the rhythmic call-and-response cadences that Martin Luther King Jr. brought so memorably from the Baptist churches of the South to the March on Washington in 1963:

I have a Dream.

Forty six years later, it’s been realized:

Yes we Can! We’re all fired up and Ready to Go!

And we know Obama channels Honest Abe. The junior senator from Illinois, as he was less than a year go—it all seems now to have gone by in a flash—opened his campaign where Lincoln got his start, Springfield, Illinois, and he’s very conscious of taking the oath of office within a month of the bicentennial of the Great Emancipator’s birth. He’ll take the oath with his hand on the same bible Lincoln used at his first inauguration.

Number 44, as he will be, has read and re-read the speeches of No. 16 and absorbed how the greatest of them, the Gettysburg Address, is the most imperishable of all the speeches in American history. Even though its 272 words were delivered in two minutes and it was gloriously unspecific. Lincoln, soon to be assassinated, did not distinguish between the Union dead and the Rebel dead who lay on that hallowed ground. Nor did he use the occasion to defend his actions, discuss slavery, or declare the policies he’d seek at victory. Instead, he offered a rededication to the new nation that had been conceived in liberty and dedicated to the inspiring proposition that all men are created equal.