The Democratic Convention is over. Along with a slew of lesser names, we’ve heard from Michelle Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Al Gore, Ted Kennedy, Joe Biden, and now, finally, the nominee himself, Sen. Barack Obama.
The Clintons
Let’s start with the Clintons. As much as I can’t stand her, Sen. Clinton’s speech was pretty decent. I particularly liked when she asked her ardent supporters:
Were you in this campaign just for me, or were you in it for that young Marine and others like him? Were you in it for that young boy and his mom surviving on minimum wage? Were you in it for all the people in this country who feel invisible?
With that refrain, she shifted the conversation away from the celebrity gossip that has been the post-primary season into the issue-based debate that must happen in the heat of the general election. And that’s all she needed to do. She needed to end the primary, and that’s exactly what she did. She was classy, she was passionate, and she got the job done.
Then there was Bill. First of all, the crowd treated him like a rock star. They gave him a rousing ovation that seemed to last for three or four minutes, despite his growing insistence that they just stop and let him speak.
Second of all — man, can this guy speechify. I was fifteen when Clinton first ran for president, and nineteen when he ran for re-election, and while I tried to pay attention to what was happening, I was pretty clueless as to just how unimpressive most politicians are. The last eight years have cleared up that misconception. And I’m not just talking about the bumbling idiot that is President George W. Bush. I’m talking about Nancy Pelosi and 9/10ths of the House of Representatives. I’m talking about Harry Reid and 7/8ths of the U.S. Senate. I’m talking about Clarence Thomas and 5/9ths of the Supreme Court. I’m talking about governors and mayors, state representatives and civil committee chairpersons, school-board administrators and local tax collectors, justices of the peace and town managers. We’re a country whose political leaders could hardly impress a first-grade class.
But then you got impressive sons of bitches like Bill Clinton. What I like best about his speeches (and he did this much more explicitly in ‘04) is that he seems to have internalized the arguments about “framing” that were first suggested by George Lakoff. He sets up clear distinctions between the Democratic and Republican views of the world, and tries to explain, in clear terms, what it is we need to be talking about.
As for examples, there was his masterful line, “People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power,” a line which will go down in history and which should be inscribed at the top of any list of Democratic principles. But there was also his breakdown of recent political history, and his framing of what this year’s election needs to be about:
On the two great questions of this election — how to rebuild the American dream and how to restore America’s leadership in the world — [McCain] still embraces the extreme philosophy that has defined his party for more than 25 years.And it is, to be fair to all the Americans who aren’t as hard-core Democrats as we are, a philosophy the American people never actually had a chance to see in action until 2001, when the Republicans finally gained control of both the White House and the Congress.
Then we saw what would happen to America if the policies they had talked about for decades actually were implemented. And look what happened.
Pres. Clinton’s speech was only twenty-minutes long, but he did what he is so good at doing: being charming, intelligent, and persuasive. A fine performance.
Senator Kerry, Al Gore, and Senator Kennedy
Moving away from the Clintons, I didn’t get the opportunity to see either Sen. Kerry’s or Al Gore’s speeches in full. What I saw of Kerry’s was decent, but I couldn’t pay much attention to his words. I was too busy imagining what it must feel like for him to be at this convention, a convention which by all rights should be focused on his re-election campaign.
I did catch Sen. Kerry’s little play of comparing Senator McCain to Candidate McCain, with a little bit of self-deprecating humor thrown in:
Candidate McCain now supports the wartime tax cuts that Senator McCain once denounced as immoral. Candidate McCain criticizes Senator McCain’s own climate change bill. Candidate McCain says he would now vote against the immigration bill that Senator McCain wrote. Are you kidding? Talk about being for it before you’re against it.Let me tell you, before he ever debates Barack Obama, John McCain should finish the debate with himself.
As for Al Gore, I only caught the tail end of his speech last night, but like when I watched Sen. Kerry, I spent too much time sympathizing with the notion that this could have been his farewell convention. This is from his opening:
Eight years ago, some said there was not much difference between the nominees of the two major parties and it didn’t really matter who became president. Our nation was enjoying peace and prosperity, and some assumed we would continue both, no matter the outcome. But here we all are in 2008, and I doubt anyone would argue now that election didn’t matter.
Where Sen. Kerry and Al Gore left me wondering what might have been, Senator Kennedy left me inspired for what yet may be. With his speech — which felt a little too close to a farewell speech for comfort — he demonstrated, yet again, what it means to be a Kennedy in American politics. Yes, the Kennedy brothers have had their scandals, and their pack of douchebaggery and lies, but they also have that unique gift that makes people want to be better than they are, to (as Lincoln said) feel the touch of “the better angels of our nature.” It’s not just a talent for oratory. It’s a sense of empathy and the welcoming light of hope.
Be as cynical as you want, but when Sen. Kennedy left his hospital bed to tell the Democratic party that “the torch has been passed to a new generation,” he wasn’t just repeating his brother’s historic line; the Lion of the Democratic Party was telling those of us who are under fifty years old that the time of the Baby Boomers is over. If America is going to become a better place, we can’t wait for the gray-haired elders to tell us how it will come to be. It’s time for us to carry the torch of progress into the dark unknown of the future. As Cormac McCarthey wrote, “We’re carrying the fire.”
Michelle Obama
I’m not a huge fan of First Lady speeches. I understand that the American voter wants to hear from the individual who is most loved and most respected by the candidate, but I think it adds to the personal drama that passes for politics today. It promotes the tabloid journalism of style over substance. It allows people who should know better to speak at length about hair styles, dress colors, and “femininity,” to wax patronizingly about whether one woman has “reached” another, about whether there’s enough apple pie on the windowsill of a woman’s smile. I’m not a huge fan of First Lady speeches.
But Michelle Obama did a hell of a job. She revealed a passionate and kind spirit that I imagine would have no problem telling the leader of the free world that he needs to shut the hell up about what’s politic, and just do the right damn thing. Though I saw it in her eyes, I wasn’t looking for devotion; what I was looking for was judgment. When she spoke about hearing her husband for the first time, she didn’t speak about what she loved about him, but what she loved about his message:
And Barack stood up that day, and he spoke words that have stayed with me ever since. He talked about the world as it is and the world as it should be. And he said that all too often we accept the distance between the two and we settle for the world as it is, even when it doesn’t reflect our values and aspirations.But he reminded us that we also know what our world should look like. He said we know what fairness and justice and opportunity look like. And he urged us to believe in ourselves, to find the strength within ourselves to strive for the world as it should be. And isn’t that the great American story?
The press has been saying for months that Michelle Obama is a bitter and hate-spewing American, but with this speech, she demonstrated just how much they’ve been lying.
Joe Biden
Joe Biden is not an orator. That’s part of why Sen. Obama selected him. He’s down home, blue collar, regular Joe. The guy that supposed to resonate with the hard-hat crew, the short-order cook, and the HVAC repairman. He’s not Starbucks. He’s Dunkin’ Donuts.
Did his speech communicate that? To some extent. There was a lot of talk of dads and sons, of hard work and determination. And of motherly advice like, “Bloody [the bully's] nose so you can walk down the street the next day.”
He talked about “the common stories among middle-class people who worked hard their whole life, played by the rules, on the promise that their tomorrows would be better than their yesterdays. That promise is the promise of America. It defines who we are as a people. And now — now it’s in jeopardy. I know it. And you know it . But John McCain doesn’t seem to get it….It’s about whether you can look your child in the eye and say, ‘We’re going to be all right.’”
Was it a good speech? Yes. Was it a great speech? No. Will it do? It has to.
