Reviewing the last few speeches of Obama, including his victory address held in Chicago, I came to a startling conclusion. He is using preacher’s oratory speech patterns to give rhythm to his address. By this trick he keeps the listeners attentive to his speech, a fact which had emerged already at the Democratic Congress in 2004, but eluded explanation then.
When you go through his speeches and keep yourself detached from what he says, but listen only to the way he says it, you could be sitting in any small church in a black neighbourhood in the United States. The ebb and flow of his voice and the intonations he uses are from a preacher’s rhetoric repertoire.
Listen to the audience then. Like church followers, they intonate the ‘Yes, we can’ like Amen or Halleluiah. Obama’s speeches are patterned to pitch on sentences that will provoke this ‘Yes, we can’ over and over. If you watch the faces of the listeners, you will see in their faces the rapture of true believers, not voters at a rally.
Add to all this Messianic terms and promises he constantly used. The promise of change and a new, better world for everybody has always been the mainstay of Messianic messages, true and false. It is further no coincidence that it’s after his Messianic promises the ‘Yes, we can’ is provoked in the audience.
If it will make his life as President any easier having followers and believers in addition to the normal voters, will be seen. It might help make the bad medicine go down when he really gets going on the present problem. It might also stiffen his back when he goes after the true culprits of the crises besetting the land and the world.
