It began with the speech at the Brandenburg Gate in Germany in June 2008, when the emerging phenomenon known as Barack Obama took his act to an international audience. The speech proved that the mania he had caused in his country had purchase beyond its own shores.
Then a worshipful crowd of over 200,000 thronged the young candidate as he used his remarkable oratorical talents to present a picture of the world remade by the force of his eloquence. It ended in Paris on Nov. 20, 2015, when Obama, his face lined, his hair white, and his demeanor exuding exhaustion and petulance, was pummeled by a once-worshipful press corps. They were seeking answers which he could not and would not deliver as to how and why, in his reluctant supervision of the war against terror, he had contrived to get everything wrong.
Between the two came another rapturous speech in Cairo on June 4, 2009, in which he proposed a new relationship between the Muslim world and the Western nations, and on June 18, 2013, a return visit to Brandenburg where he spoke to a much smaller crowd of 4,500 and an indifferent reception.
Taken together, the four events map the chart of the relationship between Obama and words, which began as his friends and turned by degrees into the most lethal of enemies.
By no coincidence, his sublime oratorical triumphs all occurred before he took office or shortly thereafter, before he had the chance to try to act on them. And when his acts failed to accord with the words that he uttered, his skills as a speaker faded away.
Obama’s career as a national figure was a creation of words that turned out in practice to be wrong or misleading, at least when it came to events. It began with a speech at the Democratic convention in 2004, when the unknown state senator from Illinois blasted his way into the national consciousness with a soaring oration about “One America” divided neither by race nor by party that dazzled his audience. But nearing the end of his last term as president, polarization appears to be greater than ever, and racial tensions seem to have reached a new high.
His first Berlin speech was compared at the time to Reagan’s and Kennedy’s, though they spoke as leaders of an embattled Western alliance, whereas he had laid out a set of misleading and vacuous platitudes, including one about how the Berlin Wall had finally fallen because “the world stood as one.”
Later, in preparing to pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan, he seemed to think he could end wars by declaring them over, even though the enemy had failed to surrender and showed no interest in changing its ways.
When his declarations had failed to arrest the hostilities, he tried to deploy still more words to make them irrelevant: “If a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant,” he told the New Yorker in January 2014. “There is a distinction between the capacity and reach of a bin Laden … versus jihadists who are engaged in various local power struggles and disputes.”
The difference between Osama bin Laden and the Islamic State, it turned out six months later, was that the Islamic State was worse. But never fear, the wordsmith had this covered too. The Islamic State had been “contained,” he said on Nov. 19, the day before more than 120 people were slaughtered in Paris and Belgium shut down due to threats made by terrorists. The end was ordained in the gauziness of that first speech in Germany. It was the day that the eloquence died.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
