Obama's Royalty

Obama gave a third press conference Wednesday. It was the one Fox didn't cover because they like Lie to Me more. I don't know if anyone watched it. I was home from UF by then, so in the real world where the Internet is not used as the primary news-carrying device a few hours after the fact, my parents had the press conference on. As an English major, I was paying more attention to the way Obama said things than to the things he was saying. I noticed that Obama doesn't know how to talk about his own power very sensibly.

I'll walk you through the scenario. A New York Times reporter cutely asks what has most surprised, troubled, enchanted, and humbled Obama. Obama cutely copies them down and goes through them one by one. He's doing quite well until he gets to "humbled." What he wants to say is that he is humbled by not being all-powerful: being President seems like an omnipotent position from the outside, but he is actually limited by other people since we have checks and balances. But he has a problem, because if he's trying to downplay his own power, he doesn't want to attach a bunch of "I"s describing it. So look at what he says instead:

"Humbled by the -- humbled by the fact that the presidency is extraordinarily powerful, but we are just part of a much broader tapestry of American life..."

Folks, that's what's known as the Royal "we." Originally, like practically everything, it started as a Latin term: royalis maiestatis. Roman emperors used it, popes used it, and English inherited it the same way: as an expression of power. I remember from one of my classes this semester that Shakespeare uses it relentlessly. For example, in Hamlet, the King's first line uses the Royal "we":

"Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother's death
The memory be green, and that it us befitted
To bear our hearts in grief, and our whole kingdom
To be contracted in one brow of woe;"
Blah blah blah.

Don't be confused. "Our" dear brother's death means "my" dear brother's death. The King is the country (as Shakespeare will later use when he calls the King of Norway "Norway"), and since he's practically all the people combined, it's appopriate to use "we."

So you see it's ironic that Obama uses a rhetorical device that asserts power when he wants to say that he isn't powerful. As Americans, we're so unused to the Royal "we" that I wonder if anyone else did a small double-take to figure out what Obama meant. "The presidency is extraordinarily powerful, but we are just part of a much broader tapestry." At first you think maybe he means Americans in general, but that doesn't make sense: we are the larger tapestry of American life. Then you think maybe he means presidents in general, but that's deliciously impossible: we only have one President at a time. When I listened to it, I tried to construe the "we" as the set of all Presidents of the US, but then I picture George Washington, John Adams, and all the rest, back from the grave in a meeting with Obama to discuss how much power the President has. Nope, Obama meant only himself.

He makes up for it, of course, in his next sentence. Once he's started talking about the limits of his power, he can say "I" as much as he wants. Notice all the "I"s:

"And so I can't just press a button and suddenly have the bankers do exactly what I want or, you know, turn on a switch and suddenly, you know, Congress falls in line."

Ha, ha. You're such a joker, Mr. President. Having a button--or, or better yet, a switch!--to get people to do what you want? How ridiculous! People aren't mechanical products like that. It takes a press conference to get us to fall in line.

Now obviously, Obama didn't mean to mean what he meant. It just came out on the fly because he had to come up with humility on the go. But let's face it: Obama's hot stuff, and if he has to step into the Royal "we" to show he isn't royalty, perhaps that says something about the kind of power a charismatic, smart President really does have.

Back in November, I said I was voting for Obama because when he became emperor, I wouldn't be able to. I think I might have to revise that slightly. In accordance with Obama's own words, I would like to say, "Hail to the King!"