The flip side also works: Time flies when things are bad.
This week, the United States still is reeling from the upheaval in the House, still is feeling economic distress, still is dreading a rematch between two geezers lurching in opposite political directions, still is torn apart by racial tensions with ancient roots. This week also will mark 15 years since Barack Obama stood before a quarter of a million people in Chicago’s Grant Park and said, “Yes, we can.”
Time flies even for a country that once, eyes raised to a bright horizon, was suffused with a sense of optimism but that now, downcast, is consumed with division and despair.
Obama, to be sure, disappointed many: conservatives who hardened their views that he was a leftist reaching too far, liberals who thought he didn’t go far enough. Today, not only is the 44th president demonized in some corners of the country, but so is his worthy Republican opponent, the late Sen. John McCain.
But there can be no debate that the Obama victory speech was a classic American expression of optimism and hope, the kind John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan might have admired — the sort that reflected the opening sentence of Kennedy’s inaugural address, a line often passed over from his “Ask Not” speech with so many other memorable moments: “We observe today not a victory of party but a celebration of freedom — symbolizing an end as well as a beginning — signifying renewal as well as change.”
As a result, Democrats and Republicans alike put Obama’s victorious remarks in the American canon (along with his 2008 concession speech after the New Hampshire primary that was set to music by the Black Eyed Peas frontman will.i.am).
“It’s a brilliant example of rhythmic language,” said Mary Kate Cary, a former George H.W. Bush speechwriter who teaches a Great American Speeches course at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs. “Politicians want speeches to be memorable and transferable, to have people leave and talk about it to their friends so the word ripples out from there. Obama got that down to the syllable.”
Let’s pause amid our despair and look back to a different time in a different country:
If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.
It is inconceivable that a passage like this could be delivered today, when the question of the survival of American democracy is top of mind not only in the United States but abroad, where our allies shudder in fear and tremble in horror while watching the stress tests this country’s democratic institutions face.
Young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, Black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled, and not disabled: Americans… sent a message to the world that we have never been a collection of red states and blue states; we are, and will always be, the United States of America.
This is another passage that no American political figure could credibly utter today. Rebuilding that sense and breaking down the walls between red and blue — the 21st-century version of the Blue and Gray — is the new American Challenge.
(This is) the answer that led those who’ve been told for so long by so many to be cynical and fearful and doubtful about what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.
With a whispery allusion to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (bending the “arc of history”), Obama spoke about the cynicism, fears, and doubts of that earlier age, when that triad seems almost quaint by today’s standards.
The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even in one term. But, America, I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you, we as a people will get there.
Here, to the trained ear or merely to those whose idealism was set afire by President Kennedy, is an allusion to his inaugural address, when the 35th president said of his goals, “All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.” Four days after Kennedy’s assassination, President Lyndon Johnson told a joint session of Congress, “Today, in this moment of new resolve, I would say to all my fellow Americans, let us continue.”
In this country, we rise or fall as one nation, as one people. Let us resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long.
We hardly need note that partisanship, pettiness, and immaturity have not perished from our politics, only that the will to dispose of them has.
Tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope.
These 40 words, and the sentiment that accompanies them, remain in the heart of Americans, regardless of their creed. Today we thirst for leadership with the credibility not only to say these words, but also to live them and work for them.
Where we are met with cynicism and doubt and those who tell us that we can’t, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can.
That phrase — yes, we can — is more than a campaign motto. It is an expression of the American character, of the country that saw tyranny in Europe and fought to end it, that saw the timeless orb of the moon in the sky and sought to reach it, that saw the threat of Soviet Communism and worked to defeat it. This speech is only 15 years old. The sentiment is two and a half centuries old. Yes, we can. Yes, we should.
A Swampscott High School Class of 1972 member, David M. Shribman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
