No aficionado of American politics can walk onto the floor of a national nominating convention without feeling at least a momentary thrill. It`s not just the milling crowd and red-white-and-blue hoopla and the speechifying and all the other cotton-candy aspects of the spectacle. It`s like the first sight of Ray Winder Field opening night under the lights. It`s more than razzmatazz and fresh paint. It`s also ritual, memory and anticipation. The great circus and experiment called American democracy is under way again.
However tarnished or dull or cynical the political game becomes, there is always the memory of the glory days and the irrepressible hope that tonight will be magical. Despite the stagecraft and PR that have overtaken the old floor fights and smoke-filled rooms, the old promise still beckons. Some great truth may have beeen told last night, some great struggle between light and darkness unfolded that very night.
Such a moment came when Barbara Jordan addressed the Democratic convention in New York just last month at the end of a long night`s journey into mediocrity.
Such a moment came when Ronald Reagan delivered his latest Last Hurrah here at the Astrodome. Both speakers made the long wait through the showers of political detritus that preceded them worth it. Suddenly politics opened into history.
What makes such moments? A confluence of the personal and political. Barbara Jordan`s words would have had little impact without her presence. The speaker is inseparable from the speech. Surely even those who hated Ronald Reagan`s guts, like those who hated Franklin Roosevelt`s, would come to see the greatness of That Man`s performance, and rise to applaud. Just as I did when Bill and Hillary Clinton arrived at Madison Square Garden to accept their party`s allegiance and acclaim. It was a natural, almost involuntary act that seemed only right.
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Yes, the Clintons` entrance was stage-managed, and the scene was highly imitative-almost an historical re-enactment of John F. Kennedy`s visit to another convention some 30 years ago. Yet the scene convinced. Perhaps it was the confluence of past and future.
Barbara Jordan`s courage and triumph were also her country`s. It was an extension of the American dream. As Ronald Reagan noted Monday night, America has not become; it is always becoming. That realization makes partisanship realization. Abe Lincoln and Harry Truman belong to us all now.
There is a narrow but crucial difference between the speaker who rallies a crowd and one who rouses a mob. I`ve been in the midst of potential mobs before-outside the federal courthouse in Pine Bluff when a school integration case was being argued, at a convention of George Wallace`s American Independent Party at Louisville, Ky., as word spread that a court had spared the life of the would-be assassin who had gunned down the party`s leader and inspiration. . . . You could almost feel the hatred rising.
Some speakers naturally unite; others divide. That is the difference between orator and demagogue. It is the difference between the crowd that turns out to watch the changing of the jackbooted, arm-swinging, goose-stepping guard at the Kremlin-and the throng that gathered to hear and protect Boris Yeltsin as he spoke from the top of a tank to rally a new Russia still a-bornin`. Here in Houston, it is the difference between the crowd`s reaction to Pat Buchanan and to Ronald Reagan. One came away feeling cleaner for having heard heard the old trouper one more time, and unavoidably begrimed for having been amused by Buchanan`s taunts.
What makes the difference between the great speaker and the small? It is more than the person of the speaker. It is how he binds his listeners together-in hope or fear, confidence or desperation. When Winston Churchill addressed the Empire at what he rightly called its Finest Hour, surely all who heard him also felt besieged, British, and utterly determined. So do words create a new reality more real than any odds.
Words can break the bounds of time and place, overcome the divisions of party and interest, and meld past and future. The rare rhetorician can bind the generations together by appealing to reason, as Adlai Stevenson did. Others can mine a common experience and a common hope, as Ronald Reagan does. A great orator shows us not his riches but our own. You needn`t be Athenian to appreciate Pericles` funeral oration. Or rather his words continue to make all Athenian, mindful of the common legacy and future of the West. And despite all that is disappointing in political life, all the crude appeals to self-interest, all that is stilted and low and cheap in public discourse, the hope of something better, something sublime, still draws us to such feats of rhetoric. Yes, we come to have our partisan prejudices confirmed. We come for ideas and insights and validation. But mainly we come in search of ourselves.