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History may rank Obama alongside America's greats
Most US presidential elections are such humdrum affairs that they are forgotten almost immediately. In 1888, Republican Benjamin Harrison, who lost the popular vote to Grover Cleveland, but won the deciding electoral vote, declared that Providence had dictated his elevation to the highest office.
- The Telegraph Group Limited
- Published: 23:02 November 9, 2008
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New York: Most US presidential elections are such humdrum affairs that they are forgotten almost immediately. In 1888, Republican Benjamin Harrison, who lost the popular vote to Grover Cleveland, but won the deciding electoral vote, declared that Providence had dictated his elevation to the highest office.
Providence indeed, a Republican Party boss sniffed, confiding that the new president "would never know how many people were compelled to approach the gates of the penitentiary to put him in that office".
Today, it is doubtful that more than a handful of Americans would know anything at all about Harrison. Nor would most voters know much about more recent presidencies.
Of course, if Obama were to prove a great orator without a ground-breaking programme, he'd become another one of the many forgotten presidents, or at best an asterisk as the country's first black chief executive.
I'm betting otherwise. Like Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D.Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan, Obama seems likely to become an unforgettable personality who presided over a transforming administration.
All those presidents of the 20th century made themselves into household names by the power of their rhetoric. All of them had the gift of gab: Theodore Roosevelt used what he called the "bully pulpit" to bring Americans to his side while FDR's "fireside chats" on the radio remain a yardstick for every aspiring politician.
Truman's "Give'em hell Harry" 1948 campaign stands as a model of how the spoken word can convert reluctant voters. JFK's brilliantly crafted inauguration speech and live televised press conferences have kept him in the country's memory for almost five decades.
More recently, Reagan's charm made him "the Great Communicator".
Judging from the extraordinary crowds that cheered Obama's pronouncements on the need for change and hope, he is a match for all of these presidential predecessors as an exceptional orator.
None of them, moreover, inspired as much enthusiasm during a campaign as Obama has over the last two years. His campaign will stand as a model that future aspirants will try to imitate.
Obama will need two terms to match the most successful recent presidencies. At the end of eight years, he will want to describe his achievements as worthy of comparison with Theodore Roosevelt's and Wilson's progressivism; with Truman's strategy of containment of the Soviet Union; with Kennedy's "New Frontier" and successful resolution of the Cuban missile crisis; with Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society", which fostered the civil rights revolution that opened the way for Obama's presidency; and with Reagan's revolution that launched the period of conservative rule in which government was seen as not the solution, but as the problem.
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