This human animal--prescient, sagacious, complex, acute, full of memory, reason and counsel, which we call man...

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    In fact, reason, which alone gives us so many advantages over beasts, by means of which we conjecture, argue, refute, discourse, and accomplish and conclude our designs, is assuredly common to all men; for the faculty of acquiring knowledge is similar in all human minds, though the knowledge itself may be endlessly diversified. By the same senses we all perceive the same objects, and that which strikes the sensibilities of the few, cannot be indifferent to those of the many. Those first rude elements of intelligence which, as I before observed, are the earliest developments of thought, are similarly exhibited by all men; and that faculty of speech which is the soul's interpreter, agrees in the ideas it conveys, though it may differ in the syllables that express them. And therefore there exists not a man in any nation, who, adopting his true nature for his true guide, may not improve in virtue.

    Cicero, On the Laws

How encouraging Mr. Cicero is.  Some days I cling to what he asserts as a drowning man might cling to a lifeline.  To temper my enthusiasm for his faith in the universality of reason and what it can accomplish I have to remind myself that just because we can doesn't mean that we will, or even that we want to practice what Cicero preaches.  Yesterday morning, hearing one inane commentary after another, I finally couldn't stand it any more.  I offed the radio before it offed itself.  I expected very little, and wasn't disappointed.  The best I heard over the last two days was on Public Radio International's The World, and even there, I rather cringed when Lisa Mullins asked two Professors of Islamic Studies something to the effect of whether Barack Obama was trying to change America's relationship with Islam or change Islam itself.  (Strange, huh?)  (They responded he wasn't in the remaking Islam business).

Anyhow, wandering around the links at The World I found myself over at the BBC website, and the most sensible presentation of this speech plus analysis I've yet found: sensible not only in what was written, but in how the page was designed.  The video of the speech is present in full.  The text of the speech is present in full.  Extensive analysis by Paul Reynolds, BBC world affairs correspondent was presented as well, but in a way I've never seen before.  Section by section the speech unfolded, but the analysis was hidden in drop-down boxes.  One could read the analysis or not read it, or best, read the entire speech first, and then return section by section, re-read what Obama said, then read what Reynolds thought, and then reason whether or not Reynold's analysis agreed with one's own.  Remarkable.  So Beeb.  So American-not.

I have done two of the steps... I'm still in the process of making my own analysis.  I'm thinking I want to write something about this, but not about just this, but Obama's rhetorical style in general.  I'm not entirely in tune with George Lakoff's framing linguistics, strict fathers v. forgiving mothers and all that.  But if we're going to make an impact on Obama's reasoning methinks we have to understand how he does reason, and looking carefully at the structure of his speeches can help us give him food for thought.  If I want to know how to convince someone else, I can do much worse than analyze how he or she tries to convince others.

In the meantime, just so the title of this entry isn't entirely misleading, let me state my humble opinion that it has been a very long time since we've had a President as subtle and intelligent as Obama is.  Bush was neither.  President Clinton was certainly intelligent-but perhaps he tried clever as a substitute for subtle.  Reagan learned how to sell stuff by selling GE refrigerators...enough said.  Carter?  Intelligent, certainly the best ex-President of my lifetime, and perhaps of any since Jefferson, but cursed with a pondering speech which the bozos in the New York smart set found too boring to pay attention to.  (If you're a New Yorker and have read this far, you're definitely not a bozo).  The thesis I'm developing is that we've forgotten how to take intelligent, serious, people seriously.  In fact, we now use "serious" as an epithet.  

It think it refreshing to have a man of letters in the White House.  I also think it is hard work, because we can't scan Obama the way we scan a beach book.  Some on my side of the political fence don't even scan him that well-rather more like they might scan The National Enquirer while waiting at the checkout counter at Pigley-Wigley.  He deserves better of us than that.  So I'm going to give my best shot at analyzing the relationship between Obama's personal history, intelligence, and rhetorical style.  I'd love to see a couple of others take a similar stab at this.  We can organize a conference, maybe.