Victory Speech.(The Talk of the Town)(Barack Obama)

A theatre critic once memorably complained of a bad play that it had not been a good night out for the English language. Among other triumphs, last Tuesday night was a very good night for the English language. A movement in American politics hostile to the possession and the possibility of words--it had repeatedly disparaged Barack Obama as "just a person of words" --was not only defeated but embarrassed by a victory speech eloquent in echo, allusion, and counterpoint. No doubt many of us would have watched in tears if President-elect Obama had only thanked his campaign staff and shuffled off to bed; but his midnight address was written in a language with roots, and stirred in his audience a correspondingly deep emotion.

On Tuesday night, Obama returned to his cherished theme, the perfection of the Union. Any victorious election speech must turn campaign vinegar into national balm, must move from local conquest to national triumph, and Obama cunningly used this necessity to expand epically through American space and time. Behind his speech were the ghosts of Lincoln's First Inaugural, which moved anxiously over "every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land," and his Second, which promised to "bind up the nation's wounds." Obama quoted from the end of the First Inaugural--"We are not enemies, but friends"--and the implication was clear: that the past eight years have been a kind of civil war.

Rhetorically, his speech sought to bind those wounds by binding us together. First, he moved through the people--young and old, rich and poor, gay and straight. Then he moved through the country--the back yards of Des Moines, the living rooms of Concord--ending, by way of the Gettysburg Address, with the earth: "from the millions of Americans who volunteered, and organized, and proved that, more than two centuries later, a government of the people, by the people and for the people has not perished from this Earth." And then he moved through time, using the epic novelist's trick of a heroine as old as the century. Ann Nixon Cooper, at the age of a hundred and six, had voted in Atlanta. Obama paused to imagine all that she had seen: woman suffrage, the "despair in the dust bowl, and Depression across the land"; the start of the Second World War, when "bombs fell on our harbor" (Pearl Harbor became simply "our harbor," which was Obama's way of reclaiming Hawaii from its recent alienation--his harbor and ours); and "the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in ...