Even though he is the most gifted orator to occupy the White House in a generation, Barack Obama faces an unnerving task Tuesday.
His words must be transformational. They have to begin the change he talked about for 18 months on the campaign trail — almost a call to arms. His speeches helped the untested president-elect to win the election.
Yet Obama will take the podium for his inaugural address staring down an economic recession. And he faces a monumental task in balancing a message of hope and sacrifice with the reality that news will not break in his direction overnight, that it could take years — perhaps his entire term — for the economy to recover.
Not since Ronald Reagan, and before that Franklin Roosevelt, have people looked to the president for some sort of departure from the news of the day.
Customarily, inaugural addresses try to elevate American spirits. They reach out to the world in the name of democracy. They call for bipartisanship and unity. And even when it is not politically necessary, they almost always call for change.
Already, Obama is tamping down the international belief that he will be the world’s savior. He has somberly talked about the time it will take for an economic recovery. He has softened timetables to leave Iraq.
“He has not had any soaring rhetoric since election night. He’s dampening expectations,” said David Kusnet, a former speechwriter for Bill Clinton and visiting fellow at the Economic Policy Institute.
Ray Zeuschner, a political-speech expert at California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo, said the balance will be difficult to strike: “He’s got to keep expectations and hopes high, but he can’t set them too high because people will get discouraged.”
Inaugurations have often come at tough times in the nation’s history. Take Abraham Lincoln’s 1861 address on the eve of the Civil War, or John F. Kennedy’s 1961 address in the throes of the Cold War, in which he said, “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.”
Amid crushing economic throes, look no farther than speeches in 1933 and 1981 by Roosevelt and Reagan, respectively. Both delivered addresses — at times specific and political — about how to solve the nation’s financial crises.
After intoning that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” Roosevelt called for “an end to speculation with other people’s money, and there must be a provision for an adequate but sound currency.”
When Reagan entered office before a severe recession, he said the federal tax burden and excessive government spending should be minimized. “It is time to check and reverse the growth of government which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governors,” he said.
Oration experts and former presidential speechwriters anticipate that Obama will beseech Americans to sacrifice time and energy in the name of the country — a common theme on his campaign stump — and perhaps a 2009 take on Kennedy’s famous 1961 line, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”
This hasn’t happened in decades, except for a buried line in Clinton’s 1993 inaugural in which he called for an investment “more in our own people, in their jobs, in their future. . . . It will not be easy; it will require sacrifice.”
Joe Tuman, a professor of political and legal communications at San Francisco State University, said campaign themes are often strengthened during inaugural addresses.
“You get to speak with a single voice. You’re at that point where people still like you. You’re very much aware of what you said earlier, and you amplify that,” he said. “You may throw some meat on the bones at that point.”
This also means that Obama, mindful that he is emerging from 77 lame-duck days into the office of an extremely unpopular president, might offer more detail about what he hopes to do than is usually delivered in an inauguration.
Often inaugurals, given just a week or two before the more nuts-and-bolts State of the Union address, are more florid than specific. Take George H.W. Bush’s 1989 speech, in which he called the totalitarian era “old ideas blown away like the leaves from an ancient, lifeless tree. . . . There are times when the future seems thick as a fog.”
But a perusal of past inaugurals tells us that in times of crisis — economic or otherwise — speeches are tightly composed to deliver solutions that will help people feel better. Even if delivered eloquently, the ideas uttered Tuesday will seem real.
“I don’t think there’s any doubt in the inaugural address that he will talk about the stimulus package and what he needs from Congress,” said Tuman, a former speechwriter.
Obama also will likely seek consensus, having positioned himself as a unity president. Even in the inauguration service itself, conservative evangelical minister Rick Warren will give the invocation and pro-gay-rights pastor and civil-rights leader Rev. Joseph Lowery will deliver a benediction.
“We’re not going to run hard right or hard left,” said Clark Judge, a former Reagan speechwriter who is managing director of the White House Writers Group. “I think people are thoroughly sick of the pettiness in Washington, . . . the mode of beating each other to a pulp and then finding a compromise. I think the country doesn’t like that.”
Speech observers also are eager to see whether Obama strikes a Lincolnesque simple speak: “My countrymen . . . think calmly and well upon this whole subject. Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time.”
Or whether he’ll channel a Kennedylike flourish: “Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths.”
Ted Sorensen, Kennedy’s speechwriter, said he knows what Obama will not do Tuesday.
“An inaugural address is not a university lecture. It is not filled with statistics or complicated analyses, nor is it a personality showoff situation,” he said. “I think it will be a definition of the Obama presidency to the world. . . . It will define his administration, and it will stamp him.”
But Sorensen points out that the speech, likely to be between 20 and 30 minutes, is still just talk.
“For all of the importance of the address, it’s still a speech,” he said. “In terms of inheriting all the problems in the country, there are a lot of other things they are thinking about.”
Post librarian Barbara Hudson contributed to this report.
