Barack Obama’s One Neat Rhetorical Trick Is Still All He’s Got

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, August 21, 2024

 

Not even his most vociferous critics would fail to concede that Barack Obama is a talented orator.  He still is, though the devices he employed to such effect during his two runs for the White House have grown a little stale. During his address to an easily electrified audience of Democrats in Chicago on Tuesday, Obama deployed the kind of apophasis and rhetorical extortion that served him so well as a campaigner but undermined his efficacy as an executive.

 

Lacquered with saccharine sentiment, Obama admonished the crowd in ways that sound superficially scolding but, in fact, flatter their sensibilities. Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, Obama insisted, “believe in” an “America where ‘we the people’ includes everyone.” And “despite what our politics might suggest, I think most Americans understand that.” Indeed, who doesn’t understand that? You know who.

 

From this launchpad, Obama rocketed into the stratosphere — an Olympian vantage from which he surveys the political landscape and heaps scorn upon its most malign elements. “Our politics have become so polarized these days that all of us across the political spectrum seem so quick to assume the worst in others unless they agree with us on every single issue,” Obama lectured. “We start thinking that the only way to win is to scold and shame and out-yell the other side. And after a while, regular folks just tune out, or they don’t bother to vote.”

 

Obama’s celestial remove from “our politics” casts himself as the omniscient narrator in our national story. Having ascended to the astral plane, the former president can identify the character flaws in his opponents, and he accentuates them by warning his allies to avoid their unhappy fates. It’s they who “thrive on division, but that won’t work for us.” It’s “we” who must “listen to their concerns and maybe learn something in the process.”

 

“Our fellow citizens deserve the same grace we hope they’ll extend to us,” Obama remarked. “That’s how we can build a true Democratic majority, one that can get things done.”

 

This is savvy stuff. On a superficial level, Obama is merely advocating conviviality, and he’s doing so in his professorial way with all apparent condescension for his own supporters. But it’s a guise to launder into the discourse a condemnation of those outside his audience. Still, swing voters never heard the patronizing disdain in Obama’s favorite rhetorical flourish. They heard a modest and disarming concession to their realities. The former president made many such concessions last night.

 

“For all the incredible energy we’ve been able to generate over the last few weeks, for all the rallies and the memes,” Obama said with all due contempt for memes, “this will still be a tight race in a closely divided country.”

 

A country where too many Americans are still struggling, where a lot of Americans don’t believe government can help. And as we gather here tonight, the people who will decide this election are asking a very simple question: Who will fight for me? Who’s thinking about my future, about my children’s future, about our future together?

 

With the hook sunk, Obama can safely descend from the heavens and engage in the very petty partisan practices he’d only just denounced. He can mock Donald Trump’s narcissistic obsessions, make lewd gestures, belittle him as the presidential equivalent of the rude neighbor who “keeps running his leaf blower outside your window every minute of every day” — no one likes that guy — and savage the fictional plutocrats out there who are eager to “put poison in our rivers.” He can do all that because he is safely ensconced outside the political process. He’s merely a dispassionate observer, you see.

 

This stratagem worked well for Obama as a campaigner. It was far less successful in the presidency. Obama often tried to similarly separate himself from the workings of the federal government over which he presided when it stumbled. But voters were less inclined to give the chief executive the benefit of the doubt. And yet, even though Obama’s practiced aloofness failed him in the Oval Office, it’s still a potent force on the campaign trail. It’s a road-worn rhetorical trick at this point, but it just might work.