How To Speak Obama: Slate

Quoted via Slate (and The New York Review of Books):

When Barack Obama speaks, novelist Zadie Smith hears in him Whitman-esque multitudes. Part of Obama's oratorical appeal—as she explains in a December speech printed in the current New York Review of Books—is his ability to voice almost anybody, which he repeatedly demonstrates in his autobiography Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.

She writes: Obama can do young Jewish male, black old lady from the South Side, white woman from Kansas, Kenyan elders, white Harvard nerds, black Columbia nerds, activist women, churchmen, security guards, bank tellers. …

He can even do the 40-ish British traveler named Mr. Wilkerson, whom he remembers looking up at the night sky in Africa and saying, "I believe that's the Milky Way."

Obama's gift—or skill—isn't mimicry. "He can speak them," Smith writes, because he possesses an ear that can really hear them, the way that George Bernard Shaw heard the variants of English and captured them for the page. more