Could Obama speech kickstart recovery?

The pressure on Barack Obama as he makes his inaugural speech later today will be almost unimaginable. As ‘Dubya’ dons his spurs and rides into the Texan sunset, the world will turn to the former law professor to provide hope on every issue from climate change to peace in the Middle East.

Then, of course, there’s that small matter of global recession. Countless millions will be hoping that the address will produce a feel-good factor that kickstarts a recovery.

As with most important presidential speeches, participants in focus groups throughout the US will use special handsets to register their degree of approval or disapproval of every sentence he utters, as he utters it.

As if that weren’t enough pressure, his chief speech-writer Jon Favreau, at only 27, is the youngest in White House history. Yet many are suggesting that he and Obama could actually pull it off.

‘Obama is the most eloquent presidential candidate since JFK,’ said Ted Sorensen in this week’s Sunday Times. ‘I think we would hear the most eloquent speech since JFK’s 48 years ago.’

Sorensen should know. It was he who helped Kennedy write his 1961 inauguration speech that contained the line, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.’

Obama is widely expected to evoke the soaring rhetoric of Abraham Lincoln when he addresses the USA – and the world – at 5pm GMT today. The president-elect has a well-documented fascination with the man and earlier this month made an unannounced pilgrimage with his family to Washington’s giant Lincoln Memorial.

It would be easy to dismiss this as a PR stunt. But others say the interest is genuine, even claiming that the two have a comparable capability to change minds with word power alone. ‘You have to go back that far, all the way to Lincoln, to find a president with that kind of literary flair,’ says Stephen Hess, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC. ‘These are not add-ons by some public relations man.’

Hess is no ivory-tower academic or misty-eyed ‘Obamaniac’ either. He’s a Whitehouse veteran of the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations and a former advisor to Presidents Ford and Carter.

Others think it will be more reminiscent of Franklin Roosevelt’s Depression-busting inaugural speech in 1933. That contained the famous line, ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself.’ And Obama is said to be avidly studying FDR’s words and methods. ‘It was very much the same way I believe Obama will seek to lead,’ Harold Evans said on BBC Radio 4 this week.

Given that the global recession is largely about the availability of credit, some might argue that it’s not rational to expect mere oratory to make a difference. For them, there’s Obama’s top priority of getting his latest $825 billion stimulus package through Congress.

But it’s also about confidence: people are afraid to spend when they think the outlook is gloomy. And it’s precisely this lack of spending that forces businesses to seek credit in the first place.

Besides, the markets are far from rational. To quote Gordon Brown’s favourite economist, John Maynard Keynes, they ‘can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent’.

So who knows? Words might work where dollars have failed.

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