You are using an outdated browser.
Please upgrade your browser
and improve your visit to our site.
Skip Navigation

Tempering Audacity

On first read Obama's speech strikes me for the simplicity of its core. For most of the way, there are no lyrical flights or poetic riffs here. It's short, declarative sentences, with a dearth of adjectives and aderbs. A typical passage reads:

America, now is not the time for small plans.
 
Now is the time to finally meet our moral obligation to provide every child a world-class education, because it will take nothing less to compete in the global economy.  

But you can't leave a crowd like that with nothing, so the speech does close on a loftier note. Sample:

Instead, it is that American spirit – that American promise – that pushes us forward even when the path is uncertain; that binds us together in spite of our differences; that makes us fix our eye not on what is seen, but what is unseen, that better place around the bend.
 
That promise is our greatest inheritance.  It’s a promise I make to my daughters when I tuck them in at night, and a promise that you make to yours – a promise that has led immigrants to cross oceans and pioneers to travel west; a promise that led workers to picket lines, and women to reach for the ballot.

And it is that promise that forty five years ago today, brought Americans from every corner of this land to stand together on a Mall in Washington, before Lincoln’s Memorial, and hear a young preacher from Georgia speak of his dream.
 
The men and women who gathered there could’ve heard many things.  They could’ve heard words of anger and discord.  They could’ve been told to succumb to the fear and frustration of so many dreams deferred.
 
But what the people heard instead – people of every creed and color, from every walk of life – is that in America, our destiny is inextricably linked.  That together, our dreams can be one.
 
“We cannot walk alone,” the preacher cried.  “And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead.  We cannot turn back.”

On paper it looks like a good balance. We'll see how it works shortly.

--Michael Crowley