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. The bar is high. Four years ago, when the Democrats gathered in Boston, a little-known Senate candidate from Illinois delivered the keynote to great acclaim. The speech launched Barack Obama upward to the stratosphere of global celebrity. Suffice it to say: Warner is unlikely to repeat Obama's experience.
It won't be entirely Warner's fault. Obama is one of the most charismatic Democrats to take the national stage in a long while. Warner, a popular governor and nice enough guy, is the dictionary definition of an empty suit. In 2004, Obama was new and many times more interesting than the dour senator who was the party's nominee. 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.
These aren't Warner's only problems. He is a centrist who will address a party that took a sharp left turn in 2006. Warner supports gun rights, wants offshore drilling along Virginia's coast, and sponsors NASCAR races. He is also wealthy, with a fortune estimated in the hundreds of millions and a perhaps understandable distaste for class-warfare rhetoric. His nonideological politics and businessman's approach to governance plays well with both Virginia's suburban liberals and southern good ol' boys. 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.
The unpleasant truth for Warner is that centrists do not give the best Democratic keynote addresses. It may not take a village to raise a child, but it takes a liberal to give a good keynote. A review of the last eight such speeches makes this clear. On the centrist side, you have the likes of Evan Bayh and Harold Ford. On the liberal side you have Barbara Jordan, Morris Udall, Mario Cuomo, Ann Richards, Barbara Jordan (again), and Barack Obama. There's no contest. The liberal's address always packs more punch. Consider, also, Bill Clinton's nominating speech at the 1988 Democratic convention, which is often mistaken for that year's keynote. Clinton is a centrist, of course. He bombed big time.
Why do the moderates suffer so? In part it must be because they have so little to say. Their ascendance took place during the Clinton era, when Democrats tried hard to muddy the ideological and programmatic differences between the two parties. It is difficult to get liberals excited about an agenda that "balances the budget to keep interest rates down," as Evan Bayh tried to do in 1996. Or try filling the heads of community organizers and labor bosses with visions of "young people . . . using their entrepreneurial spirit to build companies, start nonprofits, and drive our new economy," as Harold Ford attempted in 2000.
Unwilling to launch partisan broadsides against Republican plutocrats, the centrists inevitably fall back on self-indulgent biographical reminiscences. In his keynote, Bayh regaled the audience 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 superfluous memoir with sentimental treacle. He spoke of how he attended a "kindergarten graduation" during his first campaign, and indeed "I continue to attend kindergarten graduations to this day." And it is "with those five year olds in mind," he went on, that "our first step in encouraging their dreams and unleashing their imaginations is"--what else--"electing Al Gore our next president. For their sake, we can't go back." For the children.
The liberal keynoters, by contrast, train their cannon squarely on the Republican nominee and never let up. "The keynote should supply more of the prose, the substance, set up most of the argument," Mario Cuomo told me last week. "My job was to make the case for the Democrats. I wasn't the subject. I concentrated on the issues."
Cuomo's speech in 1984 was a stemwinder, no doubt about it. In a torrent of florid 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. . . . There is despair, Mr. President, in the faces that you don't see, in the places that you don't visit in your shining city." Heavy stuff. Cuomo's long sermon--he never used one word where he could use seven--even included a credo. All that was missing was the benediction.
Ann Richards's 1988 keynote was a lighter affair. Whereas Cuomo waxed--and waxed--eloquent, Richards assembled a litany of biting one-liners. "After listening to George Bush all these years," she began, "I figured you needed to know what a real Texas accent sounds like." After that the audience was putty in her hands. Richards was merciless. "Now that he's after a job that he can't get appointed to," she said of (the first) President Bush, "he's like Columbus discovering America. He's found child care. He's found education. Poor George. He can't help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth."
Barbara Jordan, the late congresswoman from Texas, was such a talented orator that she delivered the keynote twice, in 1976 and 1992. (Perhaps uncoincidentally, the Democrats won the presidency in both years.) Jordan's speeches were partisan, to say the least. The 1992 address was also esoteric, postmodern even. "I want you to listen to the way I have entitled my remarks," she said then. " 'Change: From What to What?' From what to what? This change--this is very rhetorically oriented--this change acquires substance when each of us contemplates the public mind. What about the public mind?"
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. "We know what needs to be done. We know how to do it. . . . We know what needs to be done and how to do it. . . . The Democratic party is alive and well. It is alive and well. . . . Change. Change. . . . That's not easy. That's not easy. But we have to do it. We have to do it." And the repetitions are annoying. And the repetitions are annoying.
The address sounds better than it reads. The climax of Jordan's 1992 speech is an exemplar of liberal rhetoric. "We must change the deleterious environment of the 80s," she said, "that environment which was characterized by greed, and hatred, and selfishness, and megamergers, and debt overhang." Debt overhang! "Change it to what? Change that environment of the 80s to an environment which is characterized by a devotion to the public interest, public service, tolerance, and love. Love. Love. Love." It's all you need.
According to Cuomo, compared with centrists, liberals have an easier time giving speeches. "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. "It's easier, emotionally, to get people aroused to talk about the people in the gutter where the glitter doesn't show. It's not 'liberal.' You're talking about people in trouble, people struggling." And the audience responds to sympathetic stories.
It may have seemed back in 2004 that Barack Obama was a centrist. In retrospect, however, it is clear that was not the case. 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. And it relied heavily on calls to national unity, a recurring trope of the liberal keynotes. "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." But, Obama went on, "there's not a liberal America and a conservative America--there's the United States of America." One people. 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."
I asked Cuomo what made Obama's speech such a success. "His eloquence, his voice, the surprise factor," Cuomo said. "They didn't know him, and what they got was far, far better than they expected. It's going to be difficult for him to give a more effective speech--ever. He is the best I have heard, and I have heard a lot of good ones." If the speech had a flaw, Cuomo said, it was that it lacked specifics. "If you ask people, was it a good speech? They say, 'Yes!' " he went on. "But then you ask them, name two things from the speech . . . they can't do it."
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. Ted Kennedy's 1980 convention speech--"The dream shall never die"--is one of few notable speeches in the senator's long career. People won't soon forget it, or Obama's. The burden on centrists like Mark Warner is to deliver a speech that people remember at all.
Matthew Continetti is an associate editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.