Obama’s speech problem

Brilliant. Moving. Eloquent. The adjectives used to describe Obama’s previous speeches sparkled like quotes on a movie marquee.

“Dude, what you’re writing is going to be hung up in people’s living rooms!” Obama aide Bill Burton reportedly enthused to Favreau.

Those who came craving Obama’s soaring references to America’s past and promise would not go home empty-handed. There was a long anecdote about Valley Forge. A tribute to “a parent’s willingness to nurture a child.” A call to listen to “the fallen heroes who lie in Arlington [and] whisper through the ages.” A reminder of “the bitter swill of civil war and segregation.”

When it was over, the audience applauded lustily. By the end of the day, copies of the speech were rolling off the presses, and commemorative booklets began rocketing up the bestseller lists.

Much later, though, writers led by The New Republic’s John B. Judis would focus on other aspects of the speech, such as the line that declared, “Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.”

As Obama spoke, Democrats were preparing to defend the bank bailout and extend it to Detroit, where overfed executives and intransigent unions had driven the auto industry into the ground. Also in the offing was a financial-reform bill that banks would oppose with all their power. These initiatives depended on voters believing that Obama’s policies would punish those whose caused the crisis and assist those who suffered.

Yet here was Obama, spreading the blame beyond the executives, beyond the Bush administration, to a collective failure to grapple with new realities. The line may have projected Obama as a national father, dispensing wisdom and facing up to hard truths. But it failed utterly in advancing the program that Democrats were preparing. Pretty soon, the public was blaming Obama for subsidizing failed bankers.

Then, when the deficit began to grow, Obama stressed the need for belt-tightening while making a lawyerly distinction between the long-term and short-term deficit; what he failed to drive home was that the programs that temporarily ballooned the deficit were emergency measures to cure the economy.

Then, when the administration focused on health-insurance reform, the administration and its allies adopted the easy, emotional shorthand of rescuing those without insurance, rather than stressing that health care costs were strangling the economy. Thus, to many, the Democratic plan seemed a discretionary item, a new kind of welfare, and Obama, despite studies showing that the health bill would actually cut the deficit, was unable to correct that impression.

Now, after a Republican takeover of the House, as Obama prepares for a pivotal State of the Union address on Tuesday night, many of the president’s supporters are facing up to another hard truth: Obama might not be as great a communicator as they thought.

History tends to separate presidential orators into those who are gifted with charisma and those poor flat-footed also-rans who lack it. But successful oratory is about more than charisma, more than speaking skills; it is ultimately the ability to connect the music of a speech to the story of the moment. The best presidential speeches fill in the whys and whens and hows of an ambitious political program. They are templates for action.

“The words can be soaring, beautiful, and eloquent, but if the ideas are flat, empty, or mean, it’s not a great speech,” Ted Sorensen, the late John F. Kennedy speechwriter, was fond of saying.

Ronald Reagan, whom Obama has praised, is rightly remembered for his lyricism, humor, storytelling flair, and timbre. But what made him a transformational figure was his ability to marshal all those attributes to persuade the American people that their government was a problem. That simple idea laid the groundwork for cutting taxes, eliminating social programs, and even appointing judges who wanted to limit federal power.

Reagan’s celebration of American values, his parables of virtue, weren’t intended merely to establish an aura, as Obama’s often seem to be. They were driving home the point that what was good in society stemmed from private initiative; what was burdensome came by way of government.

When Reagan, in his 1981 inaugural address, paid tribute to the “men and women who raise our food, patrol our streets, man our mines and our factories, teach our children, keep our homes,” he contrasted those average citizens with “government by an elite group.” He took the ritual incantation of American goodness and made it a stronger political statement by daring to identify where the goodness ends.

This combination of showing and telling separates the speeches that merely pulsate from those that set the stage for action. No one counts George W. Bush among the most silver-tongued of chief executives. But his devastating admonition about Iran, North Korea, and Iraq in his 2002 State of the Union address, “States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, aiming to threaten the peace,” provided a thumbnail justification for the “war on terror” that changed the world.

As president, Obama has dedicated himself to peeling back the excesses, rhetorical and otherwise, of Bush’s war on terror. It’s arguably his most significant accomplishment, shifting the relationship of the United States to the world without a single treaty or summit or war. But it’s been almost entirely unspoken. Glimpses of Obama’s vision appeared in his well-received speeches in Cairo and Oslo, and people outside the United States can feel the difference. But few, if any, Americans would be able to articulate it.

Obama has had his successes, but he hasn’t explained them to the public. Failing to do so is less injurious to his personal favorability, which remains reasonably high, than to those policies, from consumer banking protections to trimming back the forces in Afghanistan, which are certain to be challenged anew by the Republican majority in the House.

Obama’s inaugural address turned out to be the last of his “hope and change” speeches. He seemed to realize that the speeches that had won him the Democratic nomination weren’t going to carry well to the Oval Office. He had toned down considerably for the general-election campaign, as if overly aware of Hillary Clinton’s snipe that “you campaign in poetry, you govern in prose.”

Still, many commentators worried that Obama would internalize the idealism of his early speeches and arrive in Washington holding his nose with distaste, as Jimmy Carter is reputed to have done. So it seemed a relief when Obama chose to hole up with his work, leaving the speechifying to others. This would gently lower the expectations of his supporters (a necessary evil), while rebranding him as a workhorse rather than show horse.

Except that he threw himself into the task too completely.

And when he tried to get back on the hustings, it turned out that the man who had glided easily into those hope-and-change speeches, whose very spirit and essence conveyed a changing of the guard, lacked the rhetorical resources to sell nuts-and-bolts policies. All the writerly devices that convinced Democrats he was the one to lead them had been in the service of an image, not an agenda. The Democrats of 2008 had known where they wanted to go; they had been unsure only of who to lead them. What needed selling was Obama, not the issues.

The speech that, in retrospect, won him the presidency was delivered on Nov. 10, 2007, at the Jefferson-Jackson dinner of the Democratic Party in Iowa. It argued passionately against “triangulation,” and called for a party that “led, not by polls, but by principle, not by calculation, but by conviction,” and that “summoned the nation to a common purpose — a higher purpose.” His target was the Clintons, whose “strategic” mindset exasperated many liberals.

Not only was Obama’s forthrightness impressive, but so was his image as a man of destiny. For many Democrats, the civil rights movement had become the defining event of American history, erasing the stain of racism and confirming the highest ideals of American democracy. Obama, in his Jefferson-Jackson speech and many others, not only stated that “I am running in this race because of what Dr. King called ‘the fierce urgency of now,’ ” but incorporated King’s verbal constructions. Where King would refer to “black children and white children,” Obama would speak of “blue America and red America,” in a similar plea for common understanding.

Democrats could hear the echoes. Poised in front of state capitols, many of which were fronted by Civil War monuments, Obama would state that “our moment is now,” and people sensed what he meant. How better to cleanse the stain of the Bush presidency than to elect a true pioneer, whose very election would confirm all that is good about America.

But when Obama came to the issues, he would tick them off in list form, often to rhythmic applause. The “best education we have to offer,” “stop talking about...health care and start doing something,” “combat the common threats of the 21st century — nuclear weapons and terrorism, climate change and poverty, genocide and disease.”

He didn’t explain why a “cap and trade” system, which rewarded the cleanest industrial plants by giving them tax chits to sell to the dirtiest ones, was necessary, or how the different pieces of health reform combined to make a better whole. His Democratic audiences were already on board, and independents were ready for a change. What they admired was the way he embodied the ideals of Lincoln, Kennedy, and King.

With his speaking skills and undeniable presence, along with that carefully constructed aura of destiny, he could hardly avoid being dubbed the next Great Communicator, the title that Reagan wore like Mao’s Great Helmsman.

Democrats, who could hardly contain their excitement, were only vaguely aware that they were courting disappointment.

On Thursday, Jan. 13, after the shocking attack on a congresswoman in Arizona, a bloodbath that left six people dead and 13 injured, President Obama took center stage at a memorial service in Tucson, sharing the dais with state leaders, many of them Republicans.

Such moments — the Challenger disaster, the Oklahoma City bombings, and 9/11 — cut through partisanship and reveal one nation underneath, with one president. With his ability to convey strength and compassion, and his determination to stay above the fray, Obama was well-positioned to step into this role. But his speech, if possible, exceeded expectations, quoting from scripture (“there is a river whose streams make glad the city of God”), offering moving tributes to the victims, and delivering a firm but heartfelt plea for unity (“our hopes and dreams are bound together”).

It was enough to make believers again of many whose faith in him had waned. Clearly, he’s most comfortable in such settings, precisely because there is no politics involved. There, he can channel his heroes, King and Lincoln. On those days, it’s easy to envision that some day there will be an Obama monument in the nation's capital, alongside Roosevelt and Jefferson and the rest. It’s easy to believe that he’s envisioning it, too.

Perhaps that’s truly his destiny. But before that can happen there will be another campaign, there will be more politics, and there will be battles over everything he’s done and wants to do, from a comprehensive immigration deal, to cap and trade, to tax hikes for the rich, to all aspects of health reform.

This will be the challenge that Hillary Clinton posed in her poetry-prose jibe, that Ted Sorensen referenced in his soaring words/flat ideas warning — a test of whether he can really communicate about policies, not ideals, as compelling and necessary as those might be. After two years, there’s little evidence that he can. But a big opportunity awaits.

Peter S. Canellos is the editorial page editor of the Globe.