But I still had not heard what I had come to hear, what we had all come to hear, the speech of a lifetime (to date) by the greatest orator of his generation. One of the things that had served to discourage me over the course of the primary season was a general acceptance of the premise that oratory was a specious, feckless, inherently untrustworthy art. The Obama camp would rightly dispute the charge of offering only "pretty words," but they never seemed to argue the larger truth: that ultimately words were all we had; that writing and oratory, argument and persuasion, were the root of democracy; that words can kill, or save us; something along those lines. "You can only say what you can first imagine," as I heard Tobias Wolff (the short-story master, not the Obama campaign adviser) explain to a group of people at an Obama fund-raiser. It was a mark of Obama's fitness to lead, to me at least, that he possessed sufficient natural reserves of imagination to kick oratorical ass.
I don’t know if Barack Obama is "the greatest orator of his generation" (who’s the second greatest?), but I do know that Michael Chabon can't have been following the primaries very closely if he thinks Obama's speaking skills got disrespected. (My God, hasn't the man ever watched MSNBC?)
But the real problem with novelists writing about politics is that they get things backwards. In the eyes of history, "kicking oratorical ass" won’t mean a damn thing--might not even get you anthologized--unless you leave us with something besides your speeches.
Hillary Clinton was called a racist by the Obama Machine for daring to suggest that Lyndon Johnson deserved some credit for passing the landmark civil rights legislation of the 1960's. But she was correct. And what’s truly specious is people like Chabon attempting to equate Obama’s campaign rhetoric with the words of Lincoln or Martin Luther King. He hasn’t exactly earned it.
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