44 ways of looking at an inauguration speech

Here are all or most of them.

Some highlights, or bloopers:

Obama: note how much more action-oriented his sentences are. Here is a great cumulative sentence: The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness. It has two levels, since the clauses modify "time" and then "gift."

Clauses, by the way, after the independent clause, usually begin with a present or past participal ("passed" in the above quote) or a noun phrase (or appositive - "that noble idea," "the God-given promise") or an infinitive (beginning with "to" - "to carry forward"). Obama's directness communicates honesty and reliability, two traits for which he is most praised. By contrast, Clinton's speech, with its constant use of antithesis and protasis / apodosis, chiasmus, and anaphora, seems rather sneaky.

Here's a good glossary of rhetorical terms.

Let's look at George Washington, Clinton's apparent alter-ego. On the one hand, I was summoned by my Country, whose voice I can never hear but with veneration and love, from a retreat which I had chosen with the fondest predilection, and, in my flattering hopes, with an immutable decision, as the asylum of my declining years--a retreat which was rendered every day more necessary as well as more dear to me by the addition of habit to inclination, and of frequent interruptions in my health to the gradual waste committed on it by time. On the other hand, the magnitude and difficulty of the trust to which the voice of my country called me, being sufficient to awaken in the wisest and most experienced of her citizens a distrustful scrutiny into his qualifications, could not but overwhelm with despondence one who (inheriting inferior endowments from nature and unpracticed in the duties of civil administration) ought to be peculiarly conscious of his own deficiencies. Both sentences are remarkable, multi-level, cumulative masterpieces. Today's audiences might find them difficult to follow. Today's presidents never would have said the thing about ill health and being overwhelmed with despondence. He would have been put on medication immediately. The second sentence is suspensive to the max, because it interrupts the subject "the magnitude and difficulty" and the verb "could not but overwhelm" with a lengthy participial phrase. But Washington is pretty much saying the same thing as Obama's beginning: I am humbled, overwhelmed etc. He shows more ceremonial modesty than today's pols would probably reveal.

One more: the second George Bush. He begins by saying he is humbled. Then: We have a place, all of us, in a long story. A story we continue, but whose end we will not see. It is the story of a new world that became a friend and liberator of the old, a story of a slave-holding society that became a servant of freedom, the story of a power that went into the world to protect but not possess, to defend but not to conquer. It is the American story. This has some of the metaphysical components: "a place in all of us." Then a cumulative sentence using plenty of anaphorae and oppositions (or antitheses). He frames the long sentence with a very simple one, a single independent clause.

Politicians, broadly speaking, use the periodic style, not the running style. Why? Because the running style gives the impression of spontaneity, making-it-up-as-you-go-along. It is charming and engaging, but would not inspire trust. The periodic sentence shows a disciplined mind.