We Are the Change We Seek:
The Speeches of Barack Obama
edited by e. j. dionne jr. and joy-ann reid
bloomsbury, 376 pages, $25
The one thing we know about Barack Obama—at least, we think we know it—is that he is a great orator. From the moment he entered the nation’s consciousness in the summer of 2004, when he delivered a stirring oration at the Democratic convention in support of John Kerry’s presidential candidacy, Obama was thought to be modern America’s golden-tongued prophet, a kind of Patrick Henry and Martin Luther King in one voice.
His speeches luxuriate in big abstractions and bold imagery—liberal writers and intellectuals have long loved him for that, hearing in him a fellow practitioner. But that kind of language works better in campaigns than in governance; eventually, you have to talk about things as they are, not just as you feel they should be, and so it was inevitable that the radiance of his oratory dimmed a little once he took office. Still, and despite his heavy reliance on teleprompters for even brief talks, he quickly became known among supporters and sympathetic commentators as the nation’s “orator-in-chief,” an office he filled by delivering lengthy and sometimes ponderous speeches at moments of apparent national crisis.
Were his speeches as good as we thought? It can be a tricky thing to judge the quality of an oration, so much of it depending on the occasion in which it occurred—tone, circumstance, timing, the audience’s mood. It’s especially tricky to judge the speeches of politicians whose views we dislike, and I confess to disliking Barack Obama’s views a great deal. Even so, the twenty-seven speeches collected in We Are the Change We Seek: The Speeches of Barack Obama, edited by E. J. Dionne Jr. and Joy-Ann Reid, are neither better nor worse, for the most part, than any other American politician’s speeches: often muddled, consistently unmemorable, and boring.