Canada and Other Matters of Opinion by Rex Murphy Page B

language, those surplus properties that impart a power beyond sense, beyond just what the words say. He has mastered the timing of public address, when to pause, when to rush a phrase, how to link gesture and stance to moments of emphasis. This is the full package.
    Barack Obama could read a string of fortune cookie messages and some people would come away thinking they’d heard the Gettysburg Address.
    He gave a great performance Tuesday. The speech itself, however, was a dud. So much skill operating on so lifeless a text. It was Vladimir Horowitz playing “Chopsticks.” A speech that has hardly begun gives us clouds that are “gathering,” storms that are “raging,” a fear that is “nagging,” grievances that are “petty,” interests that are “narrow” and decisions that are “unpleasant” displays an alarming hospitality to cliché. Is there a dull-adjective shop in the new White House?
    If they carve this one in marble, the appropriate subscript will read: Bring me your poor, your tired, your hackneyed phrases—your obvious descriptors yearning to be twee.
    It contains sentences that begin as merely flat but end in perfect banality: “Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions, who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans.” How many times have you heard that sad rhetorical turn? And where the sentence should deliver its punch, in comes the pale tepid verbal paint of “too many big plans.”
    There are sentences of pure fudge: “We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people, and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan.” The first half of that sentence should have been the plainer declaration that the war against insurgent forces and al-Qaeda in Iraq has turned to success, and might have made a mention of the general, David Petraeus, who worked the change. He’s why Mr. Obama can leave.
    The second half is a pure skate. Mr. Obama is going to “forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan”? Actually, he’s going to re-engage in an unfinished war with 30,000 or so new troops. Mr. Obama’s words make it seem like peace is the starting point. Afghanistan may be as tough for him as Iraq was for George Bush.
    Do you have a sleepy idea? Give it a platitude to curl up in. Has there ever been a chamber of commerce speech that has
not
included this sentence: “The state of the economy calls for action … and we will act—not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth.” Poor old growth. Always laying that new foundation.
    Mr. Obama’s few ventures into vivid metaphor were not always happy or consistent: “We have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united.” The Civil War wasn’t a taste of anything. Neither was segregation. Both were a full meal, one of horror, the other of dishonour to the nation’s ideals. I’m not sure “swill” belongs in there at all, but it’s a strange swill that half a phrase later is a “dark chapter.” It should have been, in any case, dark chapters (war and segregation)—plural.
    Finally, I’d like to note what isn’t in this inaugural address. There is no citation of that one greater orator, whose inspiring words and assassination-amputated life reconfigured the conscience of America so that a black politician becoming its president became truly possible: Martin Luther King.
    The real preface to Mr. Obama’s inaugural address, the precondition of his being able to deliver it, will be found in Dr. King’s immensely superior “I have a dream” speech. It is inexplicable that Dr. King, the most eloquent man America produced in the twentieth century, was not quoted directly by a president whose elevation to office should be seen as the consummation of Dr. King’s martyred life’s effort.
    An inaugural address worthy of its occasion winds history into its every sentence. Echo and allusion, direct quotation, bind the day to the