Obama, the orator

Barack Obama’s speech-making ability garners as much attention as the candidate himself. He’s a masterful speaker who knows how to work a crowd, sell a message and evoke some fierce emotional and intellectual reactions.\nObama’s rhetoric rocketed to national glory at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. His eloquent message of hope and unity in a divided Red and Blue America brought tears to my eyes. I was touched and inspired. I thought, “How soon can Barack run for president?!”\nFour years later, he’s neck-and-neck for the Democratic Presidential nomination, and I’m still captivated by his eloquence and persuasiveness in stump speeches, victory speeches and press appearances. But today, his fancy talk receives more negative than positive media attention in the thick of this presidential race.\nHis detractors want voters to believe he’s a quick-talking salesman, using words to manipulate and distract us. He’s labeled as all talk and no action. His words sound pretty, but they lead us away from real change. The Clinton campaign recently attacked Obama for running only on the strength of rhetoric and hollow promises. Sen. John McCain has vowed to keep Americans from being “deceived by an eloquent but empty call for change.”\nObama has also met charges of unoriginality and plagiarism because he has borrowed phrases from great speakers such as Martin Luther King Jr. Sen. Hillary Clinton lashed out at Obama in a recent debate: “If your candidacy is going to be about words then they should be your own words ... Lifting whole passages from someone else’s speeches is not change you can believe in, it’s change you can Xerox.” \nBut before Clinton speaks of originality, she needs a history lesson. Her attacks on Obama and his rhetoric are not original either. The criticism of Obama’s powerful and persuasive speech-making today traces back more than 2,500 years when thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle attacked the Sophists, teachers of rhetoric who instructed Greeks how to use language to persuade and convince in political arenas.\nThe skepticism of Obama’s rhetoric and the attacks on his language are as ill-founded today as they were in ancient Greece. Political change comes from language that first affects our hearts and minds.\nObama masterfully weaves borrowed and original ideas together in order to create new ways of thinking. His words help voters see the world from new perspectives and embrace new attitudes. His speeches invent new ways of confronting the world that lead to new ways to identify with one another and bridge differences, which in turn create new possibilities for and pathways to action. Obama’s rhetoric isn’t empty. It’s the very force that creates the attitudes, beliefs and conditions for change.\nMocking his critics with a deliberate grammatical error, Obama told a crowd in Ohio, “I make no apologies for being able to talk good.” Nor should he. His awareness of the power and possibilities of communication gives him an advantage that will hopefully land him in the White House.