Obama and the Creation of Meaning
Check out this Wordle graphic of President Obama’s “not the state of the union” speech to Congress last night.
American, economy, health, every, people, plan, new, energy, education, Americans, America, recovery, also. These were the top words used. We didn’t hear as many specifics as we might have yearned for–or as the markets this morning indicate they were looking for–but the memes were as comforting as a warm bath after a 10 mile hike in the snow.
Obama’a speech was rhetorically excellent, his energetic delivery infectious, his vision sufficiently elevating to loosen up a worried and somewhat paralyzed nation and persuade us to consider new solutions.
“It’s not about helping banks but about helping people” was a great applause line, striking exactly the right note even though we know in our hearts that we are helping banks too. I perked up when he said, “The cost of health care keeps going up. Yet we keep delaying reform.” Has he taken on Clinton’s position that we need a universal health care plan? I dared to hope so, for incremental change won’t work and Obama has in the past tended toward the incremental fixes on this important issue.
i doubt that Obama knows exactly what solutions other than time will actually bring about a tipping point toward economic recovery. But he knows he has to keep talking about it. He knows he must keep infusing the national psyche with his signature campaign theme of hope. In fact, the most important thing isn’t the specific words he’s saying but that he’s saying them, over and over, speaking to Americans about what’s weighing on us, acknowledging our challenges and assuring us we can not just survive but thrive.
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And we will. For leadership is more than anything else the creation of meaning.
At his best, Barack Obama is the master of creating meaning the majority of Americans can relate to. From his speech on race that rode into the wave of controversy to the brilliant use of symbolism in this speech (for example, having Lilly Ledbetter, the girl from South Carolina who wrote about her school, U.S. Air pilot-hero Chesley Sullenberger in the audience), he’s striking the right balance between comforting his flock and exhorting us to do more with less.
His Republican nemesis, House Minority Leader John Boehner looked like he was sucking on a lemon when Obama was going through the litany of what we’ve (read that “the Republicans who were in control the last eight years”) done wrong. And in the official Republican response, seemingly tone deaf Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal might have blown his big audition for the Republican party’s 2012 presidential nomination. On the Political Voices of Women Livebog I participated in last night, John Hummel summed it up well: “Rundown of the Jindal speech: I’m just like Obama, only from a Bizarro universe where cutting taxes is the solution to everything, where ignoring laws is what you do, where volcanoes can monitor themselves damn it, and where Republicans were seduced by Democrats to waste a lot of money. Now, rock on!”
Personally, I wish Obama the teacher would articulate that his approach is what it means to be progressive or liberal. I’d like for him to relate his higher values to being a Democrat. His so-called postpartisan approach strikes me as disingenious at best and harmful at worst. We have political parties because we have differing world views. That’s not a bad thing. It’s the essence of democracy.
But overall, this speech was stunningly successful at creating the meaning we most need to believe in right now: that yes we can overcome the uncertainty and take charge of our own future. It was, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, the end of Barack Obama’s beginning as president. It remains to be seen whether this speech will mark the beginning of the end of our economic woe.
GLORIA FELDT is the New York Times bestselling author of several books including No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power, a sought-after speaker and frequent contributor to major news outlets, and the Co-Founder and President of Take The Lead. People has called her “the voice of experience,” and among the many honors she has been given, Vanity Fair called her one of America’s “Top 200 Women Legends, Leaders, and Trailblazers,” and Glamour chose her as a “Woman of the Year.”
As co-founder and president of Take The Lead, a leading women’s leadership nonprofit, her mission is to achieve gender parity by 2025 through innovative training programs, workshops, a groundbreaking 50 Women Can Change The World immersive, online courses, a free weekly newsletter, and events including a monthly Virtual Happy Hour program and a Take The Lead Day symposium that reached over 400,000 women globally in 2017.
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I agree, his speech was outstanding- very few leaders have that level of oratory skill and it certainly helps him get his message out- someone certainly needs to get his message out because at the beginning of the stimulus battle, the GOP were all over the talk shows outnumbering dems 2 to 1 and public support for the stimulus actually dropped until Obama went from city to city to sell it as though he were campaigning- he may need to do a lot of this unless the Dems get better at creating a simple, logical message about broad economic reform (including healthcare, housing, employee free choice, etc).
Poor Bobby Jindal- nobody would have looked or sounded good after Obama’s speech but Jindal seemed particularly stilted and there seemed to be a real disconnect between where Jindal and the Washington far right GOP are coming from (Reagans failed policies from the 80’s) and the average person’s reality- it’s all well and good Jindal wants to run for President in 2012, but aren’t he and the Eric Cantors of the world putting a narrow ideological agenda above the nation’s well-being? We are going to rise together or we are going to fall together and it’s becoming more and more obvious some in the GOP want Obama to fail.
I agree that bipartisanship is well and good but not at the expense of Obama’s policy agenda- an agenda that was overwhelmingly supported by the people. I think it’s laudable he wants to reach across the aisle but when the GOP does little more than bite his hand and trash him publicly, he needs to learn that they bear some responsibility for chaging the tone in washington too.
I also agree Obama needs to be more open about reclaiming the words “liberal”, “left” and “progressive”- they are not dirty words, particularly given the last 8 years of endless, costly war, no social agenda at all and a shameless attitude of greedy “Me-ism” hasn’t exactly been a huge success. Maybe we’ll get to the point where “conservative” and “ultra-conservative” turn people off?
Just for the record, I’m still pissed off about some of Hillary’s statements in China and I feel like the media didn’t really give the human rights angle, and the implications, enough coverage. Since the new thing seems to be to appoint “Special Envoys” to every problem spot, do you think Hillary would name me Special Envoy to Tibet? 🙂
Hey, Stacy, you don’t know till you ask re that post as special envoy to Tibet. Why not?
Thanks to you, I am now envisioning a world where “conservative” is a negative word.
I came across this link about how Obama discussed liberal/progressive/populist ideas but shied away from calling them out as such:
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0209/19294.html
I think the mainstream media plays a big role in defining and perpetuating the “liberal is a dirty word” meme.
The media plays a big part, but so do we when we recoil from an epithet. The right is ruthless at mudslinging. Liberals, progressives, Democrats, feminists, card carrying members of the ACLU–whatever, all of us on this side of the aisle have to pour starch into our spines and turn the offending label into a badge of honor.
Obama’s resolute sincerity is well expressed in yesterday’s speech, the same recognizable strain of sincerity that runs through “The Audacity of Hope” written some years back. There is a deep sense of urgency and prioritizing, and I feel the priorities he set are indeed the right ones. He talks about responsibility, in context of ending the war, the recovery plan, the future. It’s good to see the return of a notion of” responsibility” in national rhetoric; the infusion of that notion in the present climate of ideas. And the president stresses that responsibility is a two way process, and that the “system” cannot work without citizens’ participation. His call to take ownership, to belong, to be accountable is a foundational idea of democracy. We cannot continue to take the system for granted, because our blasé attitude, our fatal ignorance, our failure to participate and question and think in the long term has allowed certain actors to have considerable leeway to exploit the system. Democracy cannot be treated like one treats a free sample –received without any effort on our part, and may or may not be used.
I like how you locate his address within a framework of “creation of meaning”, because democracy is mostly about creation of meanings too. New meanings, new inclusions, new opportunities, and a new future.
Bobby Jindal’s tired rhetoric disappointed me. Indeed it almost seemed to me that he did not understand or willfully misunderstood certain parts of the presidential speech. John Hummel is hilarious!
Welcome, Debjani-
I’m most intrigued by your thought that democracy itself is about the creation of meaning. It had not occurred to me to consider the concept on that canvas, but now that you point it out, I realize it is surely true that any social construct requires leaders to create its meaning. Thanks for that insight.