Obama excels as a political orator
By JAY AMBROSE
SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE
Barack Obama is easily the best political orator in my lifetime, but not in the republic’s lifetime. He surely comes in behind William Jennings Bryan, who three times won the Democratic nomination for president owing to his speeches, and likely would have won the presidency itself with the boost of radio.
Such was the judgment of Ira Smith, a Republican who once heard Bryan talk and then said, “I listened to his speech as if every word and every gesture were a revelation. It is not my nature to be awed by a famous name, but I felt Bryan was the first politician I had ever heard speak the truth and nothing but the truth.”
As recounted in “A Godly Hero,” Michael Kazin’s superb biography of Bryan, Smith said that Bryan (1860-1925) would unquestionably have captured the White House if his speeches had been broadcast countrywide, and judging by reports of this lawyer’s melodious, inspiring, even hypnotic voice, Smith’s almost surely right.
Imagine if people across the nation had heard Bryan’s famous “Cross of Gold” speech at the 1896 Democratic convention in Chicago. At its conclusion, Kazin says, there was first a hush, and then an eruption.
“The floor of the convention seemed to heave up. Everybody seemed to go mad at once ... the whole face of the convention was broken by tumult —hills and valleys of shrieking men and women,” Kazin quotes the New York World as having reported.
Even the incurably cynical H.L. Mencken, whose newspaper stories made fun of Bryan when he testified against evolution at the Scopes Monkey Trial, was hugely impressed by his speaking abilities, Kazin tells us.
“Certainly I listened to it myself with my eyes wide open, my eyes apop and my reportorial pencil palsied,” Mencken wrote about a Bryan speech at a later Democratic convention in St. Louis. “It swept up on wave after wave of sound like the finale of Beethoven’s Eroica, and finally burst into such coruscations that the crowd first gasped and then screamed.”
Progressive
Obama does not have quite that oratorical power, but he’s excellent, a speaking force to behold, and he is like Bryan in still other ways. Bryan was a statist, populist-minded progressive waving his fist at special interests, and so is Obama. Bryan was also guilty of a squishy, if high-toned vagueness in his speeches, which were prone to error when they approached specificity. That’s Obama all over.
Bryan’s thesis that farmers would benefit if the government switched from a gold to a silver standard was shaky if not flaky, as is Obama’s thesis about arrested income mobility and his often-expressed opinion that President Bush’s tax cuts were regressive. Bryan was actually more perceptive than Obama in declaring that barriers to free trade were themselves special-interest measures afflicting the common good. Obama doesn’t seem to get it, although he is sometimes muddy on the issue.
We definitely know from Obama’s speeches that he’s for hope and change, and we can all hope that whatever changes he has in mind will be OK, because, unlike Bryan, his speeches do reach a national audience via TV. He seems to be stirring great hordes of Americans to flock to his cause, their hearts aflutter at his charisma.
Will many give thought to the content of his speeches after the moment’s exhilaration has passed? Will they then ask themselves, as one prominent figure in Bryan’s time asked later of a Bryan speech that had initially electrified him, “What did he say, anyhow?”
Or might they do as the Republican Ira Smith did after being blown away by Bryan, namely sit down and dispassionately read the speech the next day? Smith, the Bryan biography reports, found he “disagreed with almost all of it.”
X Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers, is a columnist living in Colorado.