Keynote Kalamities
CONTINETTI, MATTHEW
Keynote Kalamities If history is any guide, Mark Warner will fl op. BY MATTHEW CONTINETTI Mark Warner, the former Virginia governor who is currently running to represent that state in the...
...Cuomo’s long sermon— he never used one word where he could use seven—even included a credo...
...On the liberal side you have Barbara Jordan, Morris Udall, Mario Cuomo, Ann Richards, Barbara Jordan (again), and Barack Obama...
...We must change the deleterious environment of the 80s,” she said, “that environment which was characterized by greed, and hatred, and selfi shness, and megamergers, and debt overhang...
...In retrospect, however, it is clear that was not the case...
...And the repetitions are annoying...
...There is despair, Mr...
...It’s all you need...
...It may not take a village to raise a child, but it takes a liberal to give a good keynote...
...Warner supports gun rights, wants offshore drilling along Virginia’s coast, and sponsors NASCAR races...
...My job was to make the case for the Democrats...
...And it is “with those fi ve year olds in mind,” he went on, that “our fi rst step in encouraging their dreams and unleashing their imaginations is”—what else— “electing Al Gore our next president...
...Ted Kennedy’s 1980 convention speech—“The dream shall never die”—is one of few notable speeches in the senator’s long career...
...I concentrated on the issues...
...That’s not easy...
...There are those who are preparing to divide us,” Obama said, “the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes...
...It’s easier, emotionally, to get people aroused to talk about the people in the gutter where the glitter doesn’t show...
...Change that environment of the 80s to an environment which is characterized by a devotion to the public interest, public service, tolerance, and love...
...It’s easier to make the case for the middle class or the poor than it is to make the case for the people who are not middle class or poor,” he says...
...BY MATTHEW CONTINETTI Mark Warner, the former Virginia governor who is currently running to represent that state in the Senate, delivers the keynote address at the Democratic convention on August 26...
...These aren’t Warner’s only problems...
...President, in the faces that you don’t see, in the places that you don’t visit in your shining city...
...The bar is high...
...Jordan’s speeches were partisan, to say the least...
...Debt overhang...
...After listening to George Bush all these years,” she began, “I fi gured you needed to know what a real Texas accent sounds like...
...His eloquence, his voice, the surprise factor,” Cuomo said...
...Richards was merciless...
...Poor George...
...Listening to this, you hear echoes of Richards—“We are one nation”— as well as Cuomo—“We Democrats believe that we can make it all the way with the whole family intact...
...Now that he’s after a job that he can’t get appointed to,” she said of (the fi rst) President Bush, “he’s like Columbus discovering America...
...He’s found child care...
...Change: From What to What?’ From what to what...
...Love...
...For the children...
...He is also wealthy, with a fortune estimated in the hundreds of millions and a perhaps understandable distaste for classwarfare rhetoric...
...That’s not easy...
...It is alive and well...
...But then you ask them, name two things from the speech . . . they can’t do it...
...Apparently it’s not very bright, because in between attacks on the “thinly disguised racism and elitism which is some kind of trickle-down economics,” Jordan felt it necessary to repeat herself again and again...
...But it is unlikely to stoke the passions of the union members, academics, antiwar activists, netroots bloggers, grievance groupies, and feminists in the national party...
...It won’t be entirely Warner’s fault...
...It is diffi cult to get liberals excited about an agenda that “balances the budget to keep interest rates down,” as Evan Bayh tried to do in 1996...
...Obama is one of the most charismatic Democrats to take the national stage in a long while...
...ence with the history of his family in order to illustrate the banal lesson that, while “the challenges we face are new . . . the values that must guide us are the same...
...Ford’s rhetorical achievement was to combine superfl uous memoir with sentimental treacle...
...Unwilling to launch partisan broadsides against Republican plutocrats, the centrists inevitably fall back on selfindulgent biographical reminiscences...
...The liberal keynoters, by contrast, train their cannon squarely on the Republican nominee and never let up...
...On the centrist side, you have the likes of Evan Bayh and Harold Ford...
...And the repetitions are annoying...
...In part it must be because they have so little to say...
...Cuomo is right, of course, but he discounts Obama’s real achievement, which was delivering a Democratic convention speech that continues to impress the public...
...It’s a gift peculiar to liberals...
...We have to do it...
...But we have to do it...
...Change...
...His nonideological politics and businessman’s approach to governance plays well with both Virginia’s suburban liberals and southern good ol’ boys...
...I wasn’t the subject...
...They didn’t know him, and what they got was far, far better than they expected...
...Warner has been around since 1994, when he challenged John Warner (no relation) for the Senate and lost, and he has the unenviable task of paving the ground for a nominee who presides over a cult of personality that would make Che green with envy...
...He was born with a silver foot in his mouth...
...The climax of Jordan’s 1992 speech is an exemplar of liberal rhetoric...
...Cuomo’s speech in 1984 was a stemwinder, no doubt about it...
...Clinton is a centrist, of course...
...Suffi ce it to say: Warner is unlikely to repeat Obama’s experience...
...He is the best I have heard, and I have heard a lot of good ones...
...Change it to what...
...It’s not ‘liberal.’ You’re talking about people in trouble, people struggling...
...Warner, a popular governor and nice enough guy, is the dictionary defi nition of an empty suit...
...And it relied heavily on calls to national unity, a recurring trope of the liberal keynotes...
...Whereas Cuomo waxed—and waxed—eloquent, Richards assembled a litany of biting oneliners...
...We know how to do it...
...According to Cuomo, compared with centrists, liberals have an easier time giving speeches...
...But, Obama went on, “there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America—there’s the United States of America...
...Or try fi lling the heads of community organizers and labor bosses with visions of “young people . . . using their entrepreneurial spirit to build companies, start nonprofi ts, and drive our new economy,” as Harold Ford attempted in 2000...
...Their ascendance took place during the Clinton era, when Democrats tried hard to muddy the ideological and programmatic differences between the two parties...
...We know what needs to be done and how to do it...
...It may have seemed back in 2004 that Barack Obama was a centrist...
...For their sake, we can’t go back...
...This change—this is very rhetorically oriented— this change acquires substance when each of us contemplates the public mind...
...In 2004, Obama was new and many times more interesting than the dour senator who was the party’s nominee...
...He spoke of how he attended a “kindergarten graduation” during his fi rst campaign, and indeed “I continue to attend kindergarten graduations to this day...
...People won’t soon forget it, or Obama’s...
...A review of the last eight such speeches makes this clear...
...He bombed big time...
...What about the public mind...
...The keynote should supply more of the prose, the substance, set up most of the argument,” Mario Cuomo told me last week...
...If you ask people, was it a good speech...
...Obama’s speech contained a fair amount of biography, to be sure, but it also contained more than a few sob stories of the Barbara Jordan school of speechwriting...
...I want you to listen to the way I have entitled my remarks,” she said then...
...Change...
...Four years ago, when the Democrats gathered in Boston, a little-known Senate candidate from Illinois delivered the keynote to great acclaim...
...It’s going to be diffi cult for him to give a more effective speech— ever...
...He is a centrist who will address a party that took a sharp left turn in 2006...
...All that was missing was the benediction...
...We know what needs to be done...
...They say, ‘Yes!’ ” he went on...
...Love...
...Love...
...In a torrent of fl orid prose, he said President Reagan “believed in a kind of social Darwinism,” and that Reagan’s “shining city on a hill” was “more a Tale of Two Cities,” where “there are people who sleep in the city streets, in the gutter, where the glitter doesn’t show...
...Heavy stuff...
...The speech launched Barack Obama upward to the stratosphere of global celebrity...
...The address sounds better than it reads...
...He’s found education...
...He can’t help it...
...After that the audience was putty in her hands...
...There’s no contest...
...Why do the moderates suffer so...
...The liberal’s address always packs more punch...
...The burden on centrists like Mark Warner is to deliver a speech that people remember at all...
...Ann Richards’s 1988 keynote was a lighter affair...
...And the audience responds to sympathetic stories...
...The 1992 address was also esoteric, postmodern even...
...Consider, also, Bill Clinton’s nominating speech at the 1988 Democratic convention, which is often mistaken for that year’s keynote...
...The unpleasant truth for Warner is that centrists do not give the best Democratic keynote addresses...
...Perhaps uncoincidentally, the Democrats won the presidency in both years...
...Barbara Jordan, the late congresswoman from Texas, was such a talented orator that she delivered the keynote twice, in 1976 and 1992...
...I asked Cuomo what made Obama’s speech such a success...
...If the speech had a fl aw, Cuomo said, it was that it lacked specifi cs...
...The Democratic party is alive and well...
...One people...
Vol. 13 • August 2008 • No. 47
