It could have been champagne and canapés, but I sat down to watch Barack
Obama’s inauguration with tea and biscuits. It turned out that my homely
choice of snack couldn’t have been more appropriate: despite the momentous
magnitude of the occasion, the inauguration, thanks to access-all-areas
camera work, was an extraordinarily intimate affair. What we saw was an
unprecedented combination of the epoch-making and the minutely domestic.
Having planned to watch only the oath, I ended up glued to the screen until
past midnight, taking in (you couldn’t not) everything from the small, round
old man busily photographing his fellow guests who was in shot for the first
bit of Obama’s speech (like an annoying relative who pops up and spoils the
wedding portraits) to the slight wincing from some quarters as Aretha
Franklin hit a few duff notes, to the faintly diggy-in strap on Michelle
Obama’s evening dress.
I can’t think of a British – or indeed American – equivalent in living memory.
The day, for all its heft, was so filled with dozens of small, almost cosy,
details, all caught on camera, that watching Obama put me in mind, of all
inappropriate things, of Louis XIV at his levée, when the royal bed chamber
would be crammed with people craning to get a really good look at the king
yawning and stretching and having his nightshirt removed. “Everyone was
there,” wrote the Duc de Saint-Simon, as Louis put on his stockings.
Everyone was there on Tuesday, too, and thanks to the wonders of
high-definition TV and the omnipresent cameras you could see every pore,
every bristle, every gurn or grimace or unguarded look. There was,
specifically, a camera recording the goings-on in the private corridor that
led to the public balconied platform where the dignitaries eventually sat
and where the inauguration eventually took place.
I don’t think anyone realised they were on camera before they emerged into the
chilly sunshine: the tunnel-like corridor must have felt like the calm
before the storm, the last chance for privacy before the public performance.
But the cameras were there as the great and the good traipsed down the
corridor in a strange half-light, fiddling with their clothes and composing
their facial expressions. We could see them.
There were an amazing few seconds of Dubya, absolutely alone, having been
saluted for the last time by the guards lining the corridor, hearing the
boos from the crowd (who could also see him, via jumbo television screens).
You watched him shoot his cuffs, take a deep breath, sigh, arrange his
features into an amiable smile and make a concerted effort to stand up
straighter: for a second he looked the loneliest man in the world. As for
Dick Cheney in his wheelchair: if you thought he looked grim-faced in
public, his “private” facial expression in the corridor was the kind of
thing you’d photograph to scare children with.
You could see the movement in Michelle Obama’s throat as she swallowed hard
before emerging into the daylight and the tension in her jaw: you could see
her breathe. You could see the anxious look on the lady in the pink coat
accompanying Malia and Sasha – their nanny, presumably – as she held their
hands tightly and they wriggled about. Jenna and Barbara Bush giggled and
then composed themselves.
Later you could see Obama walking down some stairs and waiting patiently to be
announced, a model of confident, almost steely composure, a man who has
willed himself to be calm: the leader of the free world, waiting for
destiny, just a bloke standing in a corridor, alone with his suit, looking
small. The intimacy of the moment was breath-taking: you don’t normally see
this kind of stuff unless you’re somebody’s best man or birth partner.
Watching the crowd of dignitaries gathering on the platform and finding their
seats was like being a fly on the wall at an especially interesting party:
the detail was so minute that it felt like a family wedding. Everything was
on display: the bob-bles on George H W Bush’s jaunty scarf and the way
everyone seemed to like him and hug him (his wife, Barbara, less smiley, did
that matriarchal-hauteur thing, as per Curtis Sittenfeld’s brilliant novel
American Wife, and did not help him as he struggled up the stairs).
There was Ted Kennedy, precollapse, prowling like an enormous lion and being
lionised, and Al Gore, cold-eyed and with a grim sort of rictus, not talking
to anybody (not even his wife) and nobody talking to him. You never see
politicians like this – you never think: “Oh look, everyone clearly hates
Gore; I wonder why”; or: “Funny, even the Democrats seem to quite like Dubya
on a personal level – maybe he really is a charming person.”
When Rick Warren, the controversial preacher, said his very American prayer,
you could see dozens of people’s reactions and it was fascinating. Bill
Clinton prays like someone who means it; Hillary does that bowed
head/peering eyes thing, like someone who doesn’t.
The terrible poem, and its terrible delivery, caused everyone first to put on
their “I’m listening to poetry” face (see also “I’m listening to classical
music” during Yo-Yo Ma and friends’ musical interlude) and then, after five
minutes, to look intensely bored. Malia Obama, 10, took photographs of her
dad as though he were doing something funny or cool on holiday. Sasha Obama,
7, was wriggly in the way that seven-year-olds are and kept moving around,
so her mother spent ages craning her neck trying to see where she’d got to
and for a moment looking like a hassled mum rather than a first-lady-to-be.
While Obama taking “a most sacred oath” was, obviously, exciting, it came
under the heading of rec-ognisable politics – although without any strange
clothes or chains of office, hats, plumes or funny stockings, which had the
effect of suggesting a sort of easy, artless modernity. What preceded and
succeeded the oath was far more interesting: without wanting to sound too
anthropological about it, it was remarkably and strikingly human.
Later, after the walkabout, the Obamas patiently watched a vast number of
floats from the various US states parading for their delectation. Footage of
politicians watching stuff usually consists of a couple of minutes of them
knowing they’re being filmed, smiling graciously and nodding their heads
appreciatively. But the Obamas were filmed for hours and every nuance of
their facial expressions was shared with the viewing public.
You didn’t need to be a lip-reader to know they were laughing at some blokes
inexplicably pushing lawn-mowers; dancing where the music was especially
catching; cheering wildly and doing a sort of hula shuffle when the float
from Hawaii (where the president went to school) passed by; looking
extremely bored by others (complicit, “enough already” smiles); making an
obvious ‘‘effort to look supportive and enthused when
(for the first time at an inauguration) the Lesbian and Gay Band Association
twirled past; whispering to each other and then bursting out laughing at
some of the antics on display. Michelle’s height varied a couple of times –
she must have taken off her shoes at some point and then put them back on.
What does all this mean? Does it matter that the first lady might have kicked
off her shoes when she knew nobody could see her feet? Well, yes. It matters
a great deal. The public, not always consciously, judges politicians on
their gift for intimacy as much as they judge them on policy: few people can
bring themselves to vote, or wholeheartedly support, someone whose policies
are sound but whom they feel they’d rather stick pins in their eyes than
spend any time with. Obama and his advisers know this, which is why his
online presence was so significant during his campaign and why he Facebooks
and Twitters and Flickrs and is launching his White House blog (via the
excitingly revamped White House website, which was up and running within
hours of the ceremony). He is techno-savvy, to say the least, and
techno-savvy politicians are all about creating the illusion of intimacy:
see David Cameron making porridge, or chatting to Andrew Marr from his
not-too-threatening, not-too-posh designer sofa; see also the one thing that
Gordon Brown consistently fails at.
The filming on Tuesday wasn’t about illusion or manufacture, however: the
intimacy was real and in real time. Anybody watching the footage surrounding
the oath will have felt closely acquainted with the Obamas: they laugh with
each other, they sometimes look as if they are going to have a giggling fit,
sometimes she rolls her eyes and then stops herself, sometimes he suppresses
a yawn. She kicks off her tight new shoes, like we do when we sit down at
weddings; he goofs around with his children, like a normal person. They are
immediately familiar, recognisably human, like us (which means that,
cleverly, the colour of their skin becomes irrelevant).
Policy, rhetoric, oration – they’re all in place. But above and beyond all of
those, Tuesday was a masterclass in how to get people to like you. And as
any politician knows, once you’ve achieved that, you’re halfway there. He’d
have to cock up really spectacularly to change that now.
What’s that?
Michelle Obama’s gift to Laura Bush – a leatherbound notebook and a pen – was
an elegant gesture. But just what is Laura expected to write? Her memoirs?
If so, a laptop, as the blogosphere has observed, might have been more
practical.
