Somewhere between a southern congressional candidate’s urging Democratic Party delegates to “walk the talk” and dozens of politicians scoffing at their Republican opponents for the “illusion of inclusion,” I wanted to gag.
Rarely have so many unmemorable, focus-group-tested words and phrases been uttered with assembly line rapidity and banality as at both the Democratic and Republican Party conventions.
Indeed, it is safe to say that if you asked any of the 4,300 delegates or 15,000 media members to recall a single line of President Clinton’s Monday night address, which reminded one that he remains the most impressive political performer of his generation, they could not. There wasn’t one.
Come to think of it, there is arguably not a single memorable line from Clinton during his entire presidency, except his theatrical proclamation about not having had sex with Monica Lewinsky.
And with Al Gore, the nation’s First Smoocher, well, unless you find a declaration of “but the presidency is more than a popularity contest” stirring, his Thursday night acceptance was devoid of potential entries for Bartlett’s book of quotations too.
You may remember the high-fives as he ambled across the arena floor and the big wet one planted on Tipper long before even a phrase from what was probably the best speech he has delivered.
There is always the tendency to mythologize the past, so one can’t start believing that long-ago conventions were steeped with William Jennings Bryan-like inspiration at every turn. Yet, to talk to people who take words quite seriously, there is the unmistakable sense that we have entered a time of pedestrian speechifying.
Put aside Jesse Jackson and Mario Cuomo, who really can occasionally hit home runs, and the field is paltry. But why is that exactly? There surely is more public oratory and much of it given by armies of well-educated and passionate folks. What is the failing out there?
Historian Richard Norton Smith knows that people can still quote from Bryan addresses, in particular his “Cross of Gold” address, and Adlai Stevenson, notably his 1952 Democratic convention acceptance speech in which “he raised the level of political discourse, not only with style and wit but absolute disdain for pomposity.”
Smith was among a group of historians who provided analysis to “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” on PBS for the Democratic convention. Smith, who has written speeches for Presidents Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford and Bob and Elizabeth Dole, knows “great oratory does not happen in a vacuum.”
“A great speech takes color from its surrounding. That’s why Jesse Jackson in 1984 [at the Democratic convention] spoke with a kind of fire, and it was fed to his audience and fed back from its audience. A great speech is a two-way communication.”
Watching Clinton’s address here, Smith had the sense of someone going through the motions and exhibiting “focus group eloquence.” Not only aren’t the times very dramatic and the divisions between the parties not very big, there is also an element of studied calculation, with politicians intent on appealing to many groups. “The chance you’ll hear anything original diminishes to zero.”
Smith was joined by Chicago native Michael Beschloss, whose works include studies of the Lyndon Johnson presidency; Doris Kearns Goodwin, best-known for her works on Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt; and Haynes Johnson, a former Washington Post reporter who is a PBS commentator.
“Too many speeches are crafted by committees and focus groups, and the politicians want them to be safe, with a laundry list of promises for special interests,” Johnson said. “There’s no poetry or authenticity, and the public knows it.”
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Goodwin’s husband, Richard, wrote speeches for Robert Kennedy and Johnson, often traveling with them so he could pick up their cadences and natural rhythms. That was not unusual back then. These days, White House speechwriters tend to be secluded and beckoned in the same way you would call for a turkey club from room service.
But proximity may help explain a series of memorable addresses her husband produced, including in the spring of 1965 as Johnson hailed passage of the Voting Rights Act before Congress. The phrase “We shall overcome” was simple, profound and effective.
She shook her head over Karenna Gore Schiff’s Wednesday night address, in which Schiff recalled her dad helping with a childhood dinosaur diorama, hollowing out an igloo and running to the store to get Q-tips for help on some assignment.
“You might move sentiments by talking about igloos and dioramas, creating a false intimacy, making people feel good about you for a second,” Doris Kearns Goodwin said. “But they just never did that in the old days. Half of a speech wouldn’t be about your wife,which is all about the daytime TV confessional mode.”
In fact, the now reflexive use of first names reflects a once-unthinkable informality. She recalled how, at the Democrats’ famous 1940 convention in Chicago, Eleanor Roosevelt took to the stage to defend her husband, who had upset some due to his refusal to actually attend the gathering at which he was nominated for a third term and only referred to him as “the president.”
Thursday night brought a Tipper Gore slide show of Al and the kids.
“The idea of a literary speech is gone,” Johnson said. “Go read Stevenson’s in 1952. He wrote them himself, and they were beautiful.” Then, again, he notes, Stevenson did lose twice.
“As for the business about the igloo and diorama, we [the historians] were watching and hooting,” Johnson said. “It was so obvious and so cheap. It’s pandering in the worst kind of way. Would you expect a daughter to go up there and say her father was a boozer and monster? This is not oratory. It’s the talk show culture.”
“The quality of speechmaking now is very low,” Beschloss said. “It has to do with short attention spans and the very utilitarian outlook of politicians,” meaning they want short-term results.
Beschloss remembers Clinton’s 1996 acceptance speech in Chicago, sort of. “I can’t remember a line, but “it polled off the charts” (namely, positively) due to a laundry list of small proposals (like school uniforms) urged on him by Dick Morris, his notorious former adviser.
“The White House had figured that people [watching on TV] would only stick around a few minutes but that if, during those minutes, they heard two or three proposals they liked, they would stick around a bit longer,” Beschloss said.
“This utilitarian urge, trying to attain short-term objectives, is unlike, say, Franklin Roosevelt at Franklin Field in Philadelphia in 1936, with his wonderful `Rendezvous with Destiny’ speech. He wasn’t thinking in short-term, political terms,” Beschloss said.
Wandering about the convention right before Gore’s address, I encountered New York Times columnist William Safire, a speechwriter for President Richard Nixon. He recalled how Nixon cast his writers in specific roles. “Pat Buchanan was the hard-liner, Ray Price was the idealist, and I was the opportunist.”
“There does seem a dip this year in speechwriting,” Safire said. “The intensity of feeling is assuaged, I think, by peace and prosperity. In hard times or war times, good oratory is required.”
Asked for his favorite speakers, he cited Cuomo, Sen. Edward Kennedy (“He was good”) and the late Texas politician and former Treasury Secretary John Connally. But he also warned about being too fixed on specific lines because a “single line is not a speech.”
“A speech should catch the attention and build to a climax,” he said. But, unfortunately, “the symbiosis between speaker and speechwriter has broken down.”