Political Conventions - Put on a Happy Face
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Transcript of Political Conventions - Put on a Happy Face
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PUT ON A H APPY F ACE 135
Put on a Happy FaceOn occasion, the electorate may need some tough
messages, but the political reality is that people want
to vote for a positive candidate with a positive message.
We also want to believe that the future will be better than
the past. Consider the examples below.
While it is true that voters throw governments out more than they elect
them, it is also true that they vote for positive messages. Even if we
hate “the other guys,” we still need a reason to believe that times will
be better with the people who get our votes. When President W.H. Taft
mocked Woodrow Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt and activist government in
the 1912 campaign, he said “A National Government cannot create
good times... It cannot make the rain to fall, the sun to shine, or the
crops to grow.” The president reaped only 23 percent of the popular
vote and eight electoral votes. Taft was in the rare position of running
against two formidable opponents, but the speech didn’t help.
Formidable speaker and “egghead” Adlai Stevenson tried a little tough
love in 1952. He said “Let’s talk sense to the American people. Let’s tell
them the truth, that there are no gains without pains, that we are now
on the eve of great decisions, not easy decisions...” He was not a
successful politician, winning only one of his campaigns—for governor
of Illinois.
And then there’s Kennedy. In the same way as Hoover called for a
return to “normalcy” after World War I, Kennedy could have done the
same after World War II and Korea. He could also have gone on abouttechnological progress and the promises of the modern world. But he
attacked and asked: he attacked the boring 1950s American society
and asked for sacrifices from voters. In fact, he said his “New Frontier ...
holds out the promise of more sacrifice instead of more security.”
He mocked those who promised “a golden future” and hectored the
electorate by saying “too many Americans have lost their way, their
will and their sense of historic purpose.” The reason why this worked
in a squeaker election was that the stakes were high in the Cold War.
Moreover, Kennedy’s charm and wit tempered his tough-love message.
Barry Goldwater was not a happy man, but he was a happy warrior in
1964. He pointed out Democratic failures at the Bay of Pigs, in Laos
and Viet Nam and at the Berlin Wall. He criticized “rules without
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responsibility and regimentation without recourse” and the “bullies
and marauders” who roamed the streets.
Showing the same prescience that Winston Churchill showed about the
European Union in the 1940s, Goldwater said he could “see a day when
all the Americas ... will be linked in a mighty ... a rising tide of prosper-ity and interdependence.” I don’t recall the Arizona Senator getting any
credit years later for the North American Free Trade Agreement or
similar deals in South America.
Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech, made while he was president, was a
stark contrast to Ronald Reagan’s sunny outlook on America’s capabili-
ties, and Carter paid the price.
Mario Cuomo found out that it was hard to criticize Ronald Reagan
in 1984. He asked the electorate to “look past the glitter, beyond theshowmanship” and “to separate the salesman from the produce.”
It didn’t work. People liked Reagan, and fully half the population
was happy with his policies. Then Cuomo rubbed America’s nose in
its problems, speaking of the “elderly people who tremble in the base-
ments ... people who sleep in the city streets ... ghettos where thou-
sands of young people ... give their lives away to drug dealers.”
America didn’t want to focus on the negative and returned Reagan for
four more years.
Nor did the electorate in 1984 want to hear Jesse Jackson say that
“In Detroit ... babies are dying at the same rate as in Honduras, the
most underprivileged nation in our hemisphere.”
One presidential candidate who embodied the positive and the possi-
ble as much as FDR, Kennedy and Reagan is Bill Clinton, whose 1992
speech was called “I still Believe in a Place Called Hope.”
Newness
The theme of the new is important to America. As in Canada with the
fur trade, in 19th century America an enterprising young person could
always run west or into the woods to start a new life. For generations in
both countries, people with get-up-and-go and a bit of luck could fire a
gun, stick a shovel in the ground, cast a fishing net or swing an axe and
obtain riches beyond their wildest dreams. This lasted for about three
hundred years—in some remote places, into the 1950s.
This desire to reinvent our life situation, and even reinvent ourselves,
creeps into political speeches. After the turn of the 20th century, whenthe frontier had begun to close, Teddy Roosevelt’s New Nationalism
and Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom meant activist government
(of different sorts) to improve the human condition. This may have
provided a substitute for the individual’s ability to move west, or the
opportunity of a new industry to improve personal conditions.
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Herbert Hoover was way behind the curve in 1928 with his slogan of
“rugged individualism,” because there was no longer a frontier for the
individualist to exploit. He was, however, on target in rejecting the
“European philosophy of ... paternalism and state socialism.”
FDR made the case for government action by pointing out that west- ward expansion was no longer possible, natural resources had been
exploited, industrial capacity had reached its zenith and inventions
had been discovered. What the new age called for was “the soberer,
less dramatic business of administering resources and plants already
in hand, of seeking to reestablish foreign markets ... distributing wealth
[and] enlightened administration.” Roosevelt also proclaimed that
“America is new. It is in the process of change and development,” and
he still invoked the frontier metaphor in 1932, when he recalled that
in earlier times “there was always the possibility of climbing into a
covered wagon and moving west where the untilled prairies afforded
a haven for men to whom the East did not provide a place.”
In the 1960 campaign, Kennedy shrewdly combined the concept of
newness and the frontier spirit with the “New Frontier,” which he
defined as “not a set of promises [but] a set of challenges.” He also
said that there were “... uncharted areas of science and space,
unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered pockets of igno-
rance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus”to be addressed.
As recently as 1992, Bill Clinton was speaking of his “New Covenant.”
In a continent with our history, it makes sense that the electorate seeks
out the new, the bold and whatever validates individual initiative.
PUT ON A H APPY F ACE 137