The AP notes history “wants something for the ages” in Barack Obama’s Jan. 20 inaugural speech. “Not just pretty words that melt like gumdrops but something that will settle in the nation’s soul and be worth making schoolchildren memorize 100 years from now.”
Peggy Noonan: “It struck me as I watched Barack Obama, in giving a substantive economic speech just 11 days before his inaugural address, that he was trying to clear away a lot of brush, and giving the outlines of his plan in advance so as not to weigh down his inaugural with phrases like ’solar panels and wind turbines,’ ‘public-private partnership’ and ‘computerized medical records.’ So much of modern rhetoric is boring because so many modern phrases are ugly.”
“The brush-clearing suggests the inaugural itself won’t be programmatic, bureaucratic or factoid-laden but more broadly gauged and reaching at something higher. Will he reach for poetry? I hope so, if poetry is defined as no wasted words on the way to the thought and the thought is worthy and true.”
