Barack Obama's Inaugural Address

20 January 2009, Capitol Hill,Washington D.C.

Barack Obama’s inaugural address speech was uplifting, as befitted the historic moment when, for the first time, an African American was sworn in to the highest office of a nation whose population of over 300 million includes more than 40 million black people. Barack Obama's inaugural address speech was also appropriately muted for an occasion that, despite its pomp and theatricality, was overshadowed by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and by a deepening world economic crisis. It was the politics of hope informed by the politics of realism. Rhetorically, Barack Obamas inaugural speech employs some now familiar devices while skilfully approaching others and then, at the last moment, avoiding them.

Barack Obama again uses the tricolon device in his inaugrual address speech, as for example in his opening line (‘humbled’, ‘grateful’, ‘mindful’) and in the three sentences that begin ‘For us…’. Elsewhere in Barack Obama's inaugural address, Obama appears to be going down the same path with repetitions of certain phrases, but then does not deliver the expected third, as in the sections that begin ‘The time has come…’. In Obama's inaugural speech, Obama coins some memorable phrases: ‘bitter swill’ is one; another is ‘a nation cannot prosper long when it favours only the prosperous’. The most striking is Barack Obama's challenge to America’s enemies: ‘We will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.’ However, immediately after Obama finished speaking, the passage highlighted by most on-the-spot commentators was: ‘Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.’

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