Virtue scores
Review
SECTION ONE Ben Rhodes spent eight years writing words for Barack Obama — eulogies after mass shootings, addresses to foreign parliaments, remarks at the Hiroshima memorial. In All We Say, he gathers 15 of those speeches and uses them as an occasion to ask what American identity actually consists of: not as an abstraction, but as something that has to be argued for, mourned over, and re-articulated in specific rooms at specific hours. The audience is anyone who has wondered whether political language can still carry genuine meaning, and whether the idea of America is a shared inheritance or a perpetual argument. Rhodes writes as a craftsman reflecting on his tools, and the book is at its best when it treats a speech as a kind of moral document — an attempt to say something true to people who are afraid, grieving, or uncertain. Readers drawn to political history, the art of public address, or the question of national self-understanding will find the collection worth their time. SECTION TWO - **Created**: The book rests on a conviction that the people addressed in these speeches possess an irreducible dignity that the speaker is obligated to honor. Each speech is, in some sense, an act of recognition — of the dead at Hiroshima, of the grieving at Sandy Hook, of citizens asked to bear a common burden. This is civic life as an acknowledgment of the person's worth, which the CCMMP grounds in the imago Dei even where Rhodes does not name it. - **Fallen**: Several speeches in the collection were written in response to catastrophe — mass violence, political fracture, the failure of institutions. Rhodes does not sentimentalize these moments. The book implicitly acknowledges that American public life is not the fulfillment of its own ideals, and that the gap between aspiration and reality is not a communications problem but a moral one. This is brokenness diagnosed at the level of the polis, which the CCMMP would trace further back to concupiscence operating in social structures. - **Redeemed**: The arc of the collection moves toward the possibility of honest speech as a form of repair. The Hiroshima address, for instance, does not pretend that words undo what was done; it insists instead that naming suffering truthfully is itself an act of solidarity. This is not redemption in the theological sense, but it points toward the mechanism the CCMMP identifies in justice-truthfulness: that honest acknowledgment of what is broken is the precondition for restoration. - **Prudence (civic wisdom)**: Rhodes's method throughout is to show how a speech must be calibrated to its moment — who is in the room, what they have just endured, what they are capable of hearing. This is political prudence in the Thomistic sense: the application of practical wisdom to public circumstances, reading what the situation requires rather than imposing a prepared script. - **Prudence (memory)**: The 15-speech structure is itself a training in prudential memory. By moving through discrete historical occasions rather than offering a theory of American identity, the book asks the reader to learn from specific events — the use of past experience to inform present judgment that Aquinas places at the center of prudence's integral parts.
✓ Strengths
- ✓The book treats political speech as a form of moral address to the common good, framing rhetoric not merely as persuasion but as an act of truth-telling on behalf of a community — a practice that maps directly onto the virtue of justice-truthfulness.
- ✓By organizing the volume around 15 distinct speeches, Rhodes preserves the historicity of particular moments rather than abstracting them into ideology, giving the reader concrete occasions for the kind of prudential memory (prudence-memory) that Aquinas associates with learning from experience.
- ✓The question 'what does it mean to be American?' is a question about shared human dignity and social nature — the CCMMP's premises about the person as inherently relational and embedded in community.
- ✓Rhodes's attention to political language across varied contexts — war, grief, celebration, apology — implicitly trains the reader in circumspection (prudence-alertness), the practical skill of reading situations before acting within them.
- ✓The collection models how a single speechwriter's craft can serve purposes larger than any administration, gesturing toward a political prudence that transcends partisanship.
⚠ Considerations
- ⚠The book operates within a broadly secular liberal framework of American identity; it offers no transcendent grounding for human dignity, leaving the Catholic reader to supply the metaphysical foundation that the text itself does not provide.
- ⚠Rhodes served a specific political administration, and the 15 speeches are necessarily shaped by that partisanship; readers seeking a cross-spectrum account of American civic identity will find the sample skewed.
- ⚠The treatment of what it means to be American risks conflating national identity with moral identity in ways that the CCMMP would distinguish: the person's ultimate dignity is not constituted by citizenship but by the imago Dei.