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.
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