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Barack Obama inauguration speech: a greatest hits of rhetorical tricksBarack Obama's second inaugural, as far as rhetoric goes, was the equivalent of a greatest hits album knocked out in time for Christmas. All his favourite oratorical devices were on display, and all at once, as if someone had knocked a candle into the firework box.At a sentence-by-sentence level, it was filled with a device to which Obama is practically addicted: syntheton. That is, never say one thing when you can inflate the sentence with two: "effort and determination", "passion and dedication", "security and dignity", "hazards and misfortune", "initiative and enterprise", "fascism or communism", "muskets and militia" and so, unceasingly, on.At the larger level of organisation we were seeing some other old favourites – in particular anaphora, where a phrase is repeated at the beginning of successive sentences. This speech was an anaphoric relay race: "Together, we" gave way to "We, the people", which temporarily ceded the track to "Our journey is not complete until", before "You and I, as citizens" staggered to the tape with the baton.Also on show was his nifty way of shifting timescale, zipping between the grand sweep of history and the individual moment. "It will be up to those who stand here in four years, and 40 years, and 400 years hence to advance the timeless spirit once conferred to us in a spare Philadelphia hall." That climax – the rising series of terms, given extra force with epistrophe (repeating "years") – is saved from bombast by bringing it down to a moment in history. "Spare" is a lovely touch.As far as the ethos appeal goes – that is, the way an orator positions himself with the audience – Obama stuck to what he does best: aligning himself with the founding fathers and with Martin Luther King. The former was, well, pro forma, and given that the inauguration coincided with King's birthday, the latter perhaps irresistible.The former was accomplished by what may have been his number one soundbite: that none-too-subtle repetition of the phrase that opens the US constitution: "We, the people." He added his own tricolon to that of the Declaration of Independence when he declared it "our generation's task to make these words, these rights, these values – of life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – real". He ghosted liberty's "your tired, your poor, your huddled masses" when he invoked "the poor, the sick, the marginalised". Tick, tick, tick.As far as King goes, Obama's allusion to hearing "a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth" is all but a quotation – semi-blasphemous wordplay and all – from some of his own 2008 speeches ("We heard a King's call to let justice roll down like water"; "a King who took us to the mountaintop"). If Cornel West, a distinguished professor of African-American studies and what you might call a critical friend, now thinks Obama is milking it a bit, watch out.His hissingly alliterative line about "Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall […] all those men and women, sung and unsung" (also, be it noted, instances of tricolon, polysyndeton and antithesis) is another near-on self-quotation. Obama loves placenames that alliterate (he once managed to get "Boston" and "Beijing", "Arctic" and "Atlantic" and "Kansas" and "Kenya" into a single sentence).One slight surprise is that this speech made quite so free with the high style, given that attacks on the windiness of his oratory have been consistent and effective. Yes, it was slick, in places moving, and politically flinty. But I found it hard to agree with Larry Sabato, of the University of Virginia, who thought it stronger and "better written" than the one four years ago. That first inaugural was downbeat to a purpose, managing expectations and reaching across the floor after a triumphal election night speech.Here, he didn't seem sure whether to be grim and determined (note the frowny brow for the first half) or messianic, and so did both slightly half-heartedly. Sometimes, too, he crossed the line from the poetic into the merely cliched: a people variously "seared" and "tempered"; "snow-capped peaks"; "that precious light of freedom"? Come on, Barry, one wants to say. You're phoning it in.??Sam Leith is the author of You Talkin' To Me? Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama (Profile) ................
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