06:42 pm
Obama at Buchenwald
A restrained — you could say too restrained — visit by Obama to Buchenwald. (Unfortunately — and utterly inappropriately — this Hulu clip is preceded by a commercial, but it’s the only one I could find that I could embed):
This is not Obama at his best. He sounds flat. He’s reading his speech. His delivery is halting, and he makes mistakes. Perhaps most troubling, he appears to be reading the words “I will not forget what I have seen here today,” and goes back to his prepared text to talk about the experience of his great uncle liberating one of the camps.
At one point, Obama attempts to paraphrase Martin Luther King when he says that “while history is unknowable it arches towards progress.” King actually said something very different: “Let us realize that the arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice.” Before you accuse me of quibbling, keep in mind that Nazis made a fetish out of progress, and often portrayed their crimes as part of the march of history towards a more perfect society built on the idea of racial purity. Obama may have misspoke (or his speechwriter may have misdrafted), but it’s important to recognize the difference.
This could be the product of sheer exhaustion from the pace of his trip, or an attempt to tone down his style given the setting. But it would have been nice to see more passion and spontaneity.
There are some who suggest that Obama can’t work without a teleprompter in front of him. I don’t think that’s the case. But I do think that he can let a prepared text get in the way of what makes him most effective — not his ability to make speeches, but his obvious empathy and intelligence. Today represented a rare misstep — a missed opportunity to step outside the text and move his audience.