●Obama: a sexy politician an orator – 【人人分享(2)_自考专本|专升本|高升专|高升本|在职研究生-学历教育网

Indeed, he often builds his tricolons out of the balanced doubles known in formal rhetoric as syntheton (“men and women”, “colour and creed”, “young and old”, and so forth) that fill his sentences. Last July, in a speech before 100,000 people at the Victory Column in Berlin – walking pointedly in the footsteps of JFK – he said: “As we speak, cars in Boston and factories in Beijing are melting the ice-caps in the Arctic, shrinking coastlines in the Atlantic, and bringing drought to farms from Kansas to Kenya.”

A double (“Boston” and “Beijing”), leading to a tricolon whose third term is itself doubled up, the whole mixture thick with alliteration. This is very far from informal or direct or off-the-cuff speech. It is marvellously and intentionally musical.

Think of the steady, obdurate thump of stresses in Churchill’s wartime invocation of “blood, toil, tears and sweat”; or the perfect musical rightness of the opening line of the main part of the US Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident” is a perfectly cadenced iambic pentameter.

Obama’s winning slogan, “Yes we can,” draws much of its strength from its three stressed syllables. It is a metrical object called a molossus – thump, thump, thump; as in Tennyson’s “Break, break, break” or Seamus Heaney’s “squat pen rests”. You could, arguably, scan it as an anapaest (diddy dum) but our boy certainly doesn’t. The official transcript of his speech at the New Hampshire primary punctuates it thus: “Yes. We. Can.”

Repetition, particularly in the form of anaphora – where a phrase is repeated at the beginning of successive lines – is another of the prime tools of political oratory and one that Obama revels in. His speech at the Iowa caucus on January 3 2008 opened: “You know, they said this time would never come. They said our sights were set too high. They said this country was too divided, too disillusioned to ever come together around a common purpose.”

He went on to declare: “I’ll be a president who finally makes healthcare affordable ... I’ll be a president who ends the tax breaks ... I’ll be a president who harnesses the ingenuity ... I’ll be a president who ends this war in Iraq ... ” Then: “This was the moment when ... this was the moment when ... this was the moment when ... ” And, as his speech built to its climax, “Hope is what I saw ... Hope is what I heard ... Hope is what led a band of colonists to rise up against an empire.”

To an American literate in his own country’s history, Obama’s rolling repetitions will bring consciously or unconsciously to mind the Declaration of Independence. The run of charges against King George in that document rolls out in an unstoppable anaphoric fugue. “He has refused ... He has forbidden ... He has refused ... He has called together ... He has dissolved ... He has refused ... ”

Obama sets out to position himself, and his rhetoric positions him, as the inheritor of the oratorical and political traditions of Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, and Jesus Christ. That last sounds facetious, perhaps, but it isn’t entirely intended to be. On two of the occasions – at the declaration of his candidacy in Springfield, Illinois, and on the night of the New Hampshire primary – he refers to Dr King, he puts him in an expressly Biblical passage: “A King who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the Promised Land”; “We heard a King’s call to let justice roll down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

There is a strong sense of Obama locating himself in history – not so much of the past couple of decades but millennial. One of his early campaign catchphrases was, “There is something happening in America.” He’d talk about “unyielding faith”, “impossible odds”, “the voices of millions”. He’d urge crowds to recognise that “this was the moment” – that past tense giving the curious sense of already looking back on the moment, of being in and out of time; as well as burnishing the sense that the decision has already been taken. If you share Obama’s faith, as many Americans do, that’s by no means a paradox.

Obama borrows one of Lincoln’s most effective rhetorical tricks too – the sudden drop in register to plain style. The folksiness of Obama’s injunction, delivered on the night of the New Hampshire primary, “to disagree without being disagreeable” is straight from the Lincoln who talked about “cheerfully” giving protection to the states in his first inaugural. Obama described in The Audacity of Hope watching in person the way that, at the podium, George Bush’s “easy affability was replaced by an almost messianic certainty”. Obama, you could say, strives for a sort of messianic affability.