Few other modern politicians are as noted for their rhetorical talents as President-elect Barack Obama.
His political career can be tracked through his major speeches. His flair for oratory has carried him forward with supporters, and provoked the ire of opponents.
Hillary Clinton in their 2008 primary race famously bristled over credit Obama took for opposing the Iraq war in a speech as a state senator.
“I’m well aware that his entire campaign is premised on a speech he gave in 2002,” Clinton said at the time.
Clinton was partially right — Obama’s campaign has been highlighted by a series of speeches that he has given dating back to that Oct. 2, 2002, speech on Iraq he gave at Chicago’s Federal Plaza:
“I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.”
Announcing his candidacy for president on the steps of the Illinois state Capitol on Feb. 10, 2007, Obama talked about “answering the call.”
“For that is our unyielding faith — that in the face of impossible odds, people who love their country can change it. … What’s stopped us is the failure of leadership, the smallness of our politics — the ease with which we’re distracted by the petty and trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our preference for scoring cheap political points instead of rolling up our sleeves and building a working consensus to tackle big problems.”
Obama during last year’s primary answered the controversy over racially charged statements by his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, with a speech about race at Philadelphia’s Constitution Hall on March 18, 2008:
“I can no more disown [Wright] than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother — a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”
Obama last year traveled abroad, stopping in Germany to address hundreds of thousands of Europeans about prospects for a renewed alliance. He made a historic address at Berlin’s Victory Column on July 24, 2008:
“The greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us from one another. The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down.”
