“Reading through the speech (I will be honest: I couldn’t bear to listen to it live, I just couldn’t), I was haunted by an echo. The speech reminded me of something, of someone. Who was it? Woodrow Wilson? Yes, in part. But there was another ghost in the wings . . .
Got it: “Peace in our time,” the president said, “requires the constant advance of those principles that our common creed describes: tolerance and opportunity; human dignity and justice.” Now, I am as keen on tolerance and opportunity, human dignity and justice as the next gun-toting bitter-ender. But “peace in our time”? Where have we heard that before? Who was the last politician to strut across the world stage proclaiming “peace in our time”? Why, Neville Chamberlain, of course… ” – Roger Kimball, National Review, in a post called “Inaugurating President Chamberlain.”
Marty Lederman closely examines the legal arguments that could allow SCOTUS to avoid any vast federal decision in the marriage equality cases now coming before it – in particular on the issue of standing. He has seven posts in full on the question which you can read here in reverse chronological order. It’s not for everyone – except for those who truly want to understand what this epochal year for gay Americans could ultimately lead to … or not.
What I heard brought me a comparison similar to yours to Whitman and his sweeping portrait of America as the landscapes and people that make it. My reaction was to think of Carl Sandburg, and the subtle legacy his work plays through Barack Obama’s life.
The man who interviewed Obama for his position as a community organizer in Chicago, asked the younger President what he know about the city. His answer: “Hog Butcher for the World”, the first line of Sandburg’s ‘Chicago’.
Sandburg was rooted in Chicago and Illinois, as Obama soon would be, and moreover they shared a love of Lincoln and his dreams (expressed far better than I could in this brief article [PDF]. But more than that, and more than for Whitman, Sandburg’s deep connectedness to the people of his city and land evokes a care towards the pains of life’s industry in a way that is deeply felt in Obama’s writings:
I AM the people — the mob — the crowd — the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world’s food and clothes.
I’ve always felt the poem ‘Chicago’ itself encompasses Obama’s rise, the confidence and overconfidence that is nevertheless part of his appeal:
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse. and under his ribs the heart of the people,
Laughing!
Like Sandburg, Blanco brings out the full weight of work in peoples’ lives, those of both his fellow citizens and his parents who worked so that he might succeed:
Michael Grunwald heard little new in the president’s speech:
Obama has governed as a left-of-center pragmatist, and I see no evidence from his rhetoric that he intends a different approach in his second term. He did make a strong pitch for climate action, but he did that in his first inaugural, too, and then he followed up with strong climate action. He did make a strong pitch for gay marriage, but he’s been doing that for the last year. Anyone who thinks that Obama never talks about alleviating poverty or training science teachers or building research labs or reducing inequality or equal pay for equal work has never heard Obama talk.
[Y]ou could argue that there wasn’t much new in Obama’s speech if it reflects an m.o. he adopted well over a year ago. But I disagree. Since his emergence on the national scene, Obama has clung to the Eisenhower-era distinction between campaigning and governing: You make your case during election season, then take down the TV ads and stump speeches when it’s over so you can get on with policymaking. Before today, it was possible to believe Obama still clung to that distinction.
Those are not words intended to invite Republican cooperation, but to slam Republican non-cooperation; not to conciliate, but to confront. They were fighting words, and they portend a second term in which the president is fully as willing to take the fight to his opponents as they have been to take the fight to him.
Drezner thought the foreign policy section was thin. Larison is heartened:
The encouraging thing about this relative neglect of foreign policy in the address is that it suggests that foreign policy in the second term won’t be an extremely ambitious or ideologically-driven one. Bush’s Second Inaugural promised a foreign policy that was both of these things, and to the extent that the Bush administration pursued the goals outlined in that address it managed to cause a great deal of harm. We will have to hope that Obama’s boilerplate in the speech is evidence that he intends to eschew grand projects overseas in the next four years.
Freddie puts Obama’s historical examples in context:
During Obama’s speech, for which he is receiving the typically polar response, he name checked the Stonewall riots, Selma, and Seneca Falls. What’s worth saying, not so much in regards to Obama but to the liberals who zealously defend him, is that Martin Luther King was adamantly opposed to gradualism, and as Ned Resnikoff pointed out, those events of resistance represent the rejection of the political process due to the urgency of profound oppression. Gradualism has become the cudgel with which liberal Democrats beat left-wing critics, and the partisan political process is advanced not merely as the most important route to change but as the only valid route to change. To ask for change in the face of injustice and suffering is to be called naive and sanctimonious; to advocate resistance that transcends voting once every four years is to be called a traitor. Yet the man who we celebrate today, and the events referenced by the very president who is defended in those terms, speak to the profound poverty of conscience that resides in the doctrine of the lesser evil.
And Benjamin Dueholm addresses Obama’s rhetorical style:
[T]he respect for the audience implicit in these moments is rare in a politician of any stature. You, America, can get your mind around truths that are self-evident but not self-executing. You can handle the irony of uneven and unreliable progress. You won’t get angry at hearing big words.
It’s unlikely that the next president, whatever his or her party, will attempt anything like this. People are understandably a little fatigued at the Obama style. Even I am, at this point; it courts decadence to dwell so determinedly in the examples of the past and to praise the nation so constantly in such unqualified terms. But it is very probable that friend and foe alike will end up missing this, at least a little bit.
As part of a wider devastation of Morgan’s incendiary and personal rhetoric, Michael Moynihan homes in on the rather extreme way the CNN host defines his gay critics – and so, so many others.
Jack Goldsmith argues that the need for intervention in Mali was caused by intervention next door:
There are many causes, but the proximate one is the 2011 NATO invasion of Libya. A chunk of Qadaffi’s army consisted of Tuaregs – a nomadic group whose homeland includes Northern Mali, and who returned home with powerful weapons when Qadaffi was defeated. With assistance from their Islamist friends (including al Qaeda in the Islamic Magreb and Ansar Dine), they took over cities in Northern Mali and declared independence. They are now on the move south, which is the occasion for the French military action.
Sorry, but that does not even begin to explain the total collapse of Malian governance by the time [Tuaregs] Azawadis took to arms in early 2012. …By the time Qadhafi’s regime in Libya fell, northern Mali had been home to Jihadi elements that left Algeria a decade earlier after being thoroughly defeated in the civil war.
Bruce Whitehosue takes on other claims that US policy is to blame, specifically that the rebels had turned against the government once they had been trained by the Pentagon:
Pentagon-sponsored training was provided to a broad cross-section of officers and NCOs in the Malian military, of which the defectors (most of them Tuareg) made up a minority. US-trained personnel fought on both sides of the conflict: at best the effects of their training were canceled out, at worst they were negligible. The problem with the US military’s training program wasn’t that it benefited the wrong people, it’s that it didn’t work. Following exercises in 2009, detailed in Wikileaks, even one of the Malian army’s most elite units got poor evaluations despite lengthy collaboration with US trainers. Whatever “advantage” such collaboration may have provided, it was the last thing the Tuareg — experienced desert fighters — needed to defeat Malian government forces.
Olga Khazan describes the thesis of the above video:
[It] takes a bit of an advocacy bend, arguing that the United States plays a major role in the violence, both because our high levels of drug use fuel the narcotics trade and because our loose gun controls make it easy for cartels south of the border to arm themselves.
The Roman orators Cicero and Quintilian believed that “paronomasia”, the Greek term for punning, was a sign of intellectual suppleness and rhetorical skill. Jesus himself was a prodigious punster. His declaration that “upon this rock I will build my church” famously played on the way Peter’s name echoed the Ancient Greek word for rock, “petra”. Jesus may have also salted his speech with puns on Aramaic words, the language of everyday communication. When he condemns the Pharisees for letting punctilious piety blind them to mercy, Jesus calls them “blind guides, which strain at a gnat [galma], and swallow a camel [gamla]”.
And, of course, there’s Shakespeare:
The characters in his plays that begin the bawdy jests and elaborate badinage are almost always pages and buffoons, commoners at the mercy of their aristocratic overlords. Puns give them a cloak of deniability – the joke permits ordinary folk to make light of their social betters without violating the norms of respect. Sex and death were these characters’ favoured subjects – Shakespeare seemed to intuit what Freud would argue some 300 years later, that humour helps us cope with the terrifying and taboo.
The Dish 