Obama and His Words

The seduction caused by Barack Obama comes not only from the rupture of white power in the United States that his triumph represents but also from the new policies evident in his speech. The two phenomena work together: New forms of rhetoric and practice can only emerge from a breach with history. In the U.S.’s case, the interesting thing is that the rupture came as part of a political exercise that appears to have taken democracy to a new historical moment.

What surprises me most about Obama is his systematic effort to avoid the politics of Manichaeism, of war, of stigmatization and of good and evil empires. In that effort he distinguishes himself from the coarse Republican rhetoric which is always inclined to divide.

Obama’s words emphasize the search of what his opponents try to divide: the Democrat from the Republican, the American from the Muslim, the conservative from the liberal, the Latin from the African-American, the Asian from the white and so on and so on. The search for what sets people apart – and in his judgment it’s a lot – orients his policy to an ethic of reciprocal understanding.

This policy definition appears very clearly in his book “The Audacity of Hope.” The starting point is to recreate those ideals that have inhabited North Americans’ collective consciousness, to go back to the values that unite them despite all differences and that made the democratic experiment possible. It’s very clear that “recreate” does not mean a return to the past, but a rethinking of democratic foundations in a radically different historical context. If he calls his proposal “audacious,” it´s due to the fact that in contemporaneous national societies, immersed in a globalized world of competing languages, politicians choose to inflame differences, agitate dogmas, proclaim absolute truths and polarize one’s conscience. Obama argues that this way of understanding politics can be a good way of winning elections, but is not a good way to govern.

In a recent Newsweek interview, Obama was asked if he was conscious of the fact that he has the biggest megaphone in the entire world (because all presidents have a megaphone installed in their mouths and should learn how to use it responsibly and ethically). Obama said he was conscious of it and that it was leading him to emphasize three key aspects of speaking: polish commentaries to avoid “verbal errors”; not oversimplify problems in front of the public (the American people – it seems to me – not only have tolerance, but also hunger for explanations and complexities, and the willingness to recognize difficult problems); and to build an argument that has a distinct point of view. Three considerations that separate politics from dogmas and cartoons.

The conclusion of this previous is pretty obvious: Political renovations require not only the defense of new orientations in public policies but a different use of language and words, not as weapons of violence and disqualification, but as means of democratic understanding.