Considering 'Yes We Can'

A friend of mine sent me an e-mail chain about this ad, wherein some of the respondents were openly emotional. One person said it made them cry. It’s certainly aimed at young people, and its staggering spectrum of celebrity — seriously, Kanye West or Joey Fatone could have been in this ad and neither would have seemed out of place — imbues it with We Are The World-level pop cultural earnestness. (It’s probably worth noting that the original speech being remixed here was probably written by a 26-year-old.)

Has a political ad ever more effectively captured — even magnified — the candidate who was its subject? “Yes, We Can” is to be consumed by the gooey, limbic part of your brain that re-watches Imitation of Life or The Play. It’s concentrated warm fuzzies.

That’s the brilliance of the spot — and also its biggest problem.

David Plotz of Slate said on the Gabfest that part of what makes Obama an effective campaigner is that his speeches double as religious experience: people come to see him speak, and are transformed into true believers. But he said that while Obama can run around like crazy and give speech after speech in relatively sparse South Carolina for a week or so, doing so on Super Tuesday is logistically impossible.

Therein lies the genius of “Yes We Can.” Since our buddy Ari Kelman over at (the very smart) edgeofthewest put us on to it Saturday, about 900 people have sent it to me. “Yes We Can” is everywhere now — and cheap! All the folks behind the clip (we’ve been informed that it wasn’t Obama’s campaign, after all) had to do was organize the stars, edit the video and post the clip. The viewers feel inspired and get all tingly, then pass it along.

But what “Yes, We Can” doesn’t do is diffuse the most persistent complaint about Obama’s campaign: that he’s long on style and much shorter on substance. You could argue that his supposed lack of substance may be inflated, but it’s harder to argue about his campaign’s emphasis on style. I’ve read a few people talk about the power of words to inspire, but on this, Hillary Clinton is dead right: you campaign in poetry, you govern in prose. Obama’s biggest strength has been his ability to motivate with soaring oratory, but presidents don’t make great speeches, as a rule (though Reagan delivered quite a few). No one ever talks about Bill Clinton’s sixth State of The Union address. While it’s undoubtedly a good skill to have, the fact that so much of Obama’s campaign rides on beautiful speechification underscores the suspicion that there’s not a whole lot else there besides the pretty sermons disguised as big ideas.

In a great article in the New Yorker, George Packer discusses Hillary Clinton’s dangerous inability to rile up crowds the way Obama does. The anecdote he uses is telling.

It was the day before the primary, and Obama began to improvise a theme, almost too much in the manner of Martin Luther King: “In one day’s time.” It carried him through health care, schools, executive salaries, Iraq—everything that Clinton had invoked, except that this was music. Then came the peroration: “If you know who you are, who you’re fighting for, what your values are, you can afford to reach out to people across the aisle. If you start off with an agreeable manner, you might be able to pick off a few folks, recruit some independents into the fold, recruit even some Republicans into the fold. If you’ve got the votes, you will beat them and do it with a smile on your face.” It was a summons to reasonableness, yet Obama made it sound thrilling. “False hopes? There’s no such thing. This country was built on hope,” he cried. “We don’t need leaders to tell us what we can’t do—we need leaders to inspire us. Some are thinking about our constraints, and others are thinking about limitless possibility.” At times, Obama almost seems to be trying to escape history, presenting himself as the conduit through which people’s yearnings for national transformation can be realized.

Obama spoke for only twenty-five minutes and took no questions; he had figured out how to leave an audience at the peak of its emotion, craving more. As he was ending, I walked outside and found five hundred people standing on the sidewalk and the front steps of the opera house, listening to his last words in silence, as if news of victory in the Pacific were coming over the loudspeakers. Within minutes, I couldn’t recall a single thing that he had said, and the speech dissolved into pure feeling, which stayed with me for days.