Full text and video of Barack Obama's speech

Somewhere in his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, the neurologist Oliver Sacks recalls a group of deeply aphasic patients watching Ronald Reagan give one of his ultra chummy telly talks. These sensitive people, who couldn’t speak but were expert decoders of body language, hooted with laughter at “the grimaces, the histrionics, the false gestures and, above all, the false tones and cadences of the voice”.

I can’t see Barack Obama having a similar effect on those aphasics, or anyone else, and that, paradoxically, is because he’s a better actor than the former pro. When he speaks, he seems instinctively to know the secrets of performance. Don’t push it. Less is more. Don’t be ingratiating. Trust yourself and your audience. Don’t try to be loved, or you may end up deeply unloved. In fact, don’t act at all. Be the character you’re playing, which, for Barack Obama, is Barack Obama.

I’ve seen him give three keynote speeches and each has hugely impressed me. When he discussed race, he deftly combined complexity with clarity. In Berlin he covered scores of subjects, from nuclear proliferation to peace in Belfast, and remained unpretentiously forceful and verbally flawless throughout. A few days ago, in Ohio, he denounced Wall Street and trickle-down economics with a zest that never became shrill. In every case there was restraint and, largely because of that restraint, power.

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BACKGROUND

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Everyone agrees about his qualities as a performer. He’s so effortlessly articulate and fluent you wish you could turn him into a manual for would-be speakers. What fascinates me is his body language. He knows the value of stillness. Yes, he moves his head a bit, but it’s so natural I sometimes think he is speaking without an Autocue. He uses his hands, but so economically that they italicise his points without drawing attention to themselves.

His strengths go beyond that. I once taught semiotics, concealing that I didn’t know what they were. To experience Obama is to understand them. There he stands, upright and trim in his dark suit, light blue tie and whiter-than-white shirt. His face, relative youth and unaffected humility signal freshness, difference, challenge. His clothes, poise and quiet dignity signal authority, safety, security. To get all semiotic, he’s a paradox. The sum effect, from dress to diction, is to say this: I will change your lives but you have nothing to fear.

Is that presidential? Well, I’ve seen clubby Reagan and sprightly Kennedy, craggy Johnson, shifty Nixon, folksy Carter, sly Clinton, two unexciting Bushes and someone called Ford who passed through my mind without leaving any impression. I don’t think any fitted the bill better than Barack Obama.

— Benedict Nightingale is chief theatre critic of The Times

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