On the third night of this year's virtual Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama reminded us that he is still his party's best speaker.
Unlike his peers, the former president understands the rhythms of both written and spoken English. He has a formal understanding of rhetoric (his "I understand" anaphora) without being stuffy about it. He moves freely between complex sentences, neat apothegms ("Democracy was never meant to be transactional") and casualisms ("Stay safe. God bless"). He also deploys quotations skillfully.
Obama does not speak the cloying language of American progressivism in 2020. Gone was the condescending girl power routine of the commercials in the first hour and the nonsense about gun violence as a "public health crisis." Instead he made a brief for a vanished liberalism that increasingly seems as remote from the Democratic Party as Lyndon Johnson or Grover Cleveland. (He also offered a not-so-implicit rebuke to certain elements in his party when he compared racism to anti-Catholic bigotry.) The minute Obama began his remarks it was clear that we were watching an adult speak in adult language to a decidedly adult audience.
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The content of the former president's speech was worthy of the form. Obama made the case against Donald Trump clearly but concisely while acknowledging the frustrations that made the latter's election possible. He was also shrewd enough to say the quiet part out loud: "Many of you have already made up your minds." It is impossible to imagine any other figure in American politics, including this year's nominee, saying "Black lives matter, no more but no less" with conviction and impunity.
Obama spoke, as he always did from the time he became a national political figure in 2004, as if he actually intended to persuade the American people.
