America is ready for an orator again

Senator Barack Obama
Originally uploaded by Stephen Voss

I saw the “Yes We Can” video (in the “Featured Video” box on the front page) for the first time a day or so after it hit the net. Until that point, I had passed on this election cycle’s rhetoric. After eight years of a declining quality of voice in our administration, I found little point in hitching my attention to pundits looking to tackle the center of American low-brow.

The video is a haunting homage to Obama’s New Hampshire concession speech which went largely uncovered by mainstream press. Black Eyed Peas’ Will.I.am opens the piece in stark black and white. He’s familiar, but not household. And when he opens his mouth, it’s not his voice that comes out.

It’s Obama’s.

More stars follow. I know most of them, but couldn’t tell you their names. The video doesn’t tell either, their voices added the Candidate’s own in celebrity anonymity. Twisted.

And it struck me, about half-way through, just how different this campaign really is on all fronts. This campaign is led — in both camps — by candidates not afraid of language, not hobbled by words, not mystified by routine turns of phrase.

Sure, I’m enamored by Obama, but I was and Edwards fan from the start. What many saw as a silver tongued charlatan I saw as confidence and composure under great pressure. However you look at Edwards, the guy could talk.

Clinton has a way with words, too. She has an incredible ability to turn from stern matriarch to warm grandmother, and showcases this in her language. She talks of experience. But polls show people want change — and the fact that she’s the first woman to win a presidential primary in … ahem … history … isn’t quite enough. She doesn’t know how to turn all that experience-speak into language which conceptualizes change for America’s 5-head household.

John McCain has a tough road ahead. From McCain’s corner, how thrilling would it have been to run against another short, stocky, lock-jawed and brooding white guy in the general? No, he has to engage his own, convince the red line republicans that he’s not actually a democrat, and somehow play nice to the center at the same time. What he has going for him in his language is his experience. He talks war. He talks foreign policy. Unfortunately, he talks other wars. He talks foreign policy from other generations. He’s savvy with a teleprompter, but he’s tied to the role of Poppa Smurf to Clinton’s Grandma. To counter that appearance, crazy Pat Buchanan said on the Today Show this morning that “If McCain wins, he’ll make Bush look like Ghandi.”

Both Romney and Huckabee share a gift of speech. Romney is the story-teller, hanging his hat on all that the current administration hasn’t accomplished. Speaking in negatives is hard, and is the sources of many of the current president’s verbal flubs. But he’s so able at the mic that he can deliver terrible news and still make you feel that you’re on a beach, being fanned by an island native holding a left-over giant foam “Go Mitt” finger.

Huckabee goes for statistics. And while his penchant for bullet points communicates a great natural sense of logic and form, it will likely matter little to the sleeping audience.

But make a note of what you don’t see: opportunities to poke at inadequacies of the common. The current administration has had to tow a long line of spin around Bush Jr.’s verbal guffaws. ‘He’s common man… just like aMERicans’,” they’d say. That has become abundantly clear over the last eight years. I believe that many have come to the realization that the office of the president of the United States is one for the best of America, for a representative who showcases the traits to which we aspire.

This year, for the first time in a long, long time, it would appear that we have a real choice no matter what color your vote.