“Great­ness is never given. It must be earned.” — Barack Obama

As some one who has had the occa­sion to do a lot of pub­lic speak­ing, I pay par­tic­u­lar atten­tion to speeches, speak­ers and gen­eral speech­mak­ing of any sort whether it be impromptu, the­atri­cal, extem­per­a­ne­ous or for­mal. The time for great for­mal speeches and states­man­ship seemed to be in the past until the admit­tedly astound­ing rise of Barack Obama, and it is good to see such renewed inter­est in speeches from the Joe Six-Pack crowd. Yes­ter­day, in the midst of a national moment of cele­breation and rejoic­ing, we heard freshly sworn-in Pres­i­dent Barack Obama’s first speech to the nation he now leads. More than just the typ­i­cal qua­dren­nial refresh­ing of exec­u­tive author­ity and dust­ing off of pomp and cir­cum­stance, this event was widely antic­i­pated to be a uni­fy­ing touch­stone and a lamp­light­ing of his­toric proportion.

And it was.

Ok, yeah but how was the speech?

First, Slate’s anno­tated tran­script and below, the video.

And now from  NYTimes.com, the pro­fes­sional crit­i­cisms.  

I found William Safire’s cri­tique to be espe­cially astute in the tech­ni­cal analy­sis. I even learned a new word. Anaphora: a rhetor­i­cal tech­nique uti­liz­ing the same open­ing phrase in sev­eral suc­ces­sive sen­tences. He dates him­self to the era of crit­i­cal for­mal­ism by refus­ing to acknowl­edge con­text, thereby lim­it­ing the use­ful­ness of his appraisal to the tech­ni­cal. I do agree with his ass­es­ment that there was no “great theme,” but I think that using a slightly wider lens we can see where this speech fits in at the tail end of  the candidate’s theme of “hope/change” and the start of a  pres­i­den­tial theme of “change/work.” Obama’s truly great speeches tend to come in the mid­dle of an effort, not the start or end — hall­marks of some­one that has think­ing more evo­lu­tion­ary than rev­o­lu­tion­ary. With that in mind look to this sum­mer for truly world-changing rhetoric.

Jeff Shesol then lauds the restraint dis­played, which I agree with.

While com­mend­ing the President’s aggres­sive attempt to spread the cen­ter to the “very bound­aries of the nation,” Gor­don Stew­art is put-off by the lack of specifics. But in an admin­is­tra­tion promis­ing to be the most open and trans­par­ent in his­tory, are impor­tant speeches the place to elab­o­rate on pol­icy minutiae?

The Times also has this excel­lent inter­ac­tive page with every inau­gural address, with syn­op­sis and a tag cloud for each.