Why do Democrats have such crappy campaign slogans?
A few deep thoughts that have nothing to do with my upcoming Econ Seminar presentation: why do Democratic presidential campaigns always end up with such hopeless, lousy campaign slogans? And is this a development that has occured within my politically aware lifetime?
For some reason, I had just been thinking about Kerry's "Stronger at home, Respected in the world" campaign theme. To be fair, back in July of 2004, I recall being actually pretty pleased when Kerry settled on this theme. "Stronger" was sturdy. It didn't inspire sniggers. It was something both the candidate and his surregates could say out on the trail without seeming foolish. And it sure as hell beat Kerry's previous slogan, the one he'd been experimenting with in the spring, "Let America be America again" (At the time, Timothy Noah of Slate politely explained some of the various problems with this Langston Hughes tribute slogan.) And that hadn't even been the worst of it: back in the dark days of Kerry's primary campaign, his people had adopted the slogan "The Real Deal". To put it succintly, no male liberal politician should ever refer to himself as "the real deal". It immediately made me think of that SNL sketch about Al Gore's 2000 running mate search in which the guy playing Kerry bangs himself on the chest and refers to himself confidently as "the total package".
At another level, though, "Stronger", along with its biographical counterpart, "A Lifetime of Strength and Service" sort of encapsulated the eventual problems with the Kerry campaign: it was servicable, respectable, coolly compentent, but utterly soulless -- especially compared to Bush's soothing, strutting-with-subtlety, almost-perfect-iambic-pentameter, "Steady Leadership in Times of Change" (say it three times to yourself.) "Stronger at home", by contrast, seemed to prove concretely that the Democrats still hadn't learned the lessons of 1988 (or 2000 for that matter). It's not about competence, though competence helps. It's about ideology. Kerry's slogan showed he was Dukakis without the month-long post-convention vacation, without the high-minded firing of John Sasso, with realistic competence in spades, but scattershot vision: a man, in fact, fully deserving of 48% of the popular vote and his party's respect in defeat.
But the problem was hardly limited to the Kerry campaign. Kerry's primary rivals also had slogan problems. The most famous slogan of the season was Dean's "You have the power". Late in the game, when Dean's people were haphazardly trying to transition him from insurgent to frontrunner, the campaign theme became "Results not rhetoric", possibly the most blatantly oxymoronic campaign slogan in history. But Dean never really got over "You have the power"; it was, in the end, what defined him. It's the title he gave his campaign memoir. And along with its counterpart, "Help me take this country back", it did have a real oomph during the Sleepless Summer Tour, when Dean barked it at conflict-and-solidarity-starved Democrats at outdoor rallies. But in the end, it was also Dean's undoing. The vast majority of primary voters didn't want to "have the power", or the responsibility, to win the election and save the country. That's the job of the nominee. So rightly or wrongly (probably rightly), they decided that Kerry was, in fact, "the real deal" (or "the total package". Whatever.)
The nicest, most genuinely memorable bit of rhetoric to come out of the 2004 primaries had to be John Edwards' sweet, sad "There are two Americas" talk, particularly when combined with Edwards' earnest decrying of an economic system that rewards "wealth, not work". But much got lost in the translation into a campaign slogan: "Let's make one America.", which was too sweet, too trite by half, reinforcing all of Edwards' bad play-doh stereotypes. This was equally true also of Edwards' abysmal, over-emotional "Hope is on the way!" admonition at the 2004 Convention and later on the trail. (It's also, it's worth pointing out, a long-standing problem for the candidate. Way back in 2002, Edwards named his midterm PAC the New American Optimists PAC, earning Josh Marshall's derision. While Edwards' populism can be appealling, the tone-deafness of all this is remarkable: was ever there was an election cycle -- beginning with the theft of the presidency, leading through a terrorist attack, a recession, the corporate scandals and an unnecessary, dishonestly advoctated, nightmarish war and occupation of a soveriegn country -- that screamed out not to be based on the other side's delightful hope and optimism?
But 2004 wasn't even necessarily a bumper year for bad sloganeering. Back in 2000, the Gore campaign, like its candidate, found itself caught between two opposing slogans, representing two opposing worldviews -- the earthy-lyrical, Stanley-Greenberg-approved "The people not the powerful" and the safe, New-Economy-buzzword, Mark Penn-approved "Keep the prosperity going". Nothing captures the conundrums of the Gore campaign better than these two phrases. Gore officially rolled out the first in his loving tribute to his southern progressive father at the 2000 convention, in almost-perfect-iambic quadrameter (And never in the years to come...did he forget the reason he entered public service -- to fight for the people, not the powerful). The problem with "the people" was that it was too personal, too combattive to repeat over and over on the campaign trail without eventually sounding silly, always a risk for Gore. It was also his one really good moment in the campaign and such things rarely last in politics. Typically, the conflict-loving press exascerbated the problem by unhelpfully changing the slogan to "The people versus the powerful", that extra syllable doing a lot to ruin things.
So Gore ended up falling back on the alternative tie into the Clinton years, the utterly forgettable "Keep the prosperity going". It reminded me a lot of a mattress warehouse somewhere that had gotten an overlarge shipment. "Great deals! Low, low prices! Keep the prosperity going with the Gore Democrats!" For a candidate with sincerity and/ or political-identity problems, this was just terrible. But in fact the slogan was so bad that even Clinton sounded oily rather than soothing while saying it out on the trail in the dying days of the campaign.
But the very worst slogan of my political life had to belong to Gore's primary opponent that year. Bill Bradley's campaign catch-phrase was, incredibly, "It can happen" (later amended to the more reasonable "Make it happen", but not until after New Hampshire.) Ask yourself this: If you were a neoliberal insurgent running against an incumbant vice president from a popular administration, what would you most want people to think? Would it really be something along the lines of "Bill Bradley? That guy from New Jersey? Huh, well It Can Happen I guess. I mean, last summer my brother finally got a job. We didn't see that one coming...
So where are the great Democratic slogan writers? Going back into the mists of time, there was Clinton's basically vapid but pitch-perfect, beating-them-at-their-own-game "Bridge to the Future" 1996 reelection campaign theme. Clinton's crowning touch was the "Bridge to the 21st Century" twist of his nominating speech, the perfect, if slightly cruel, rubuttal to Dole's proffered "bridge to the past". Clinton's 1992 slogan, "Our new covenant" was actually wonderful rather than just effective: an evoking of scripture, erudition, tantalizing promise and the ever-powerful theme of conquering and remaking the party in your image. On the other hand, that was arguably what Dean wanted to do in 2003 when he told us "You have the power!", and look where that got him (well, the Chairmanship, at least.)
With campaign slogans, as with everything, greatness is fleeting. But some basic competence, and ideology, would be good.
For some reason, I had just been thinking about Kerry's "Stronger at home, Respected in the world" campaign theme. To be fair, back in July of 2004, I recall being actually pretty pleased when Kerry settled on this theme. "Stronger" was sturdy. It didn't inspire sniggers. It was something both the candidate and his surregates could say out on the trail without seeming foolish. And it sure as hell beat Kerry's previous slogan, the one he'd been experimenting with in the spring, "Let America be America again" (At the time, Timothy Noah of Slate politely explained some of the various problems with this Langston Hughes tribute slogan.) And that hadn't even been the worst of it: back in the dark days of Kerry's primary campaign, his people had adopted the slogan "The Real Deal". To put it succintly, no male liberal politician should ever refer to himself as "the real deal". It immediately made me think of that SNL sketch about Al Gore's 2000 running mate search in which the guy playing Kerry bangs himself on the chest and refers to himself confidently as "the total package".
At another level, though, "Stronger", along with its biographical counterpart, "A Lifetime of Strength and Service" sort of encapsulated the eventual problems with the Kerry campaign: it was servicable, respectable, coolly compentent, but utterly soulless -- especially compared to Bush's soothing, strutting-with-subtlety, almost-perfect-iambic-pentameter, "Steady Leadership in Times of Change" (say it three times to yourself.) "Stronger at home", by contrast, seemed to prove concretely that the Democrats still hadn't learned the lessons of 1988 (or 2000 for that matter). It's not about competence, though competence helps. It's about ideology. Kerry's slogan showed he was Dukakis without the month-long post-convention vacation, without the high-minded firing of John Sasso, with realistic competence in spades, but scattershot vision: a man, in fact, fully deserving of 48% of the popular vote and his party's respect in defeat.
But the problem was hardly limited to the Kerry campaign. Kerry's primary rivals also had slogan problems. The most famous slogan of the season was Dean's "You have the power". Late in the game, when Dean's people were haphazardly trying to transition him from insurgent to frontrunner, the campaign theme became "Results not rhetoric", possibly the most blatantly oxymoronic campaign slogan in history. But Dean never really got over "You have the power"; it was, in the end, what defined him. It's the title he gave his campaign memoir. And along with its counterpart, "Help me take this country back", it did have a real oomph during the Sleepless Summer Tour, when Dean barked it at conflict-and-solidarity-starved Democrats at outdoor rallies. But in the end, it was also Dean's undoing. The vast majority of primary voters didn't want to "have the power", or the responsibility, to win the election and save the country. That's the job of the nominee. So rightly or wrongly (probably rightly), they decided that Kerry was, in fact, "the real deal" (or "the total package". Whatever.)
The nicest, most genuinely memorable bit of rhetoric to come out of the 2004 primaries had to be John Edwards' sweet, sad "There are two Americas" talk, particularly when combined with Edwards' earnest decrying of an economic system that rewards "wealth, not work". But much got lost in the translation into a campaign slogan: "Let's make one America.", which was too sweet, too trite by half, reinforcing all of Edwards' bad play-doh stereotypes. This was equally true also of Edwards' abysmal, over-emotional "Hope is on the way!" admonition at the 2004 Convention and later on the trail. (It's also, it's worth pointing out, a long-standing problem for the candidate. Way back in 2002, Edwards named his midterm PAC the New American Optimists PAC, earning Josh Marshall's derision. While Edwards' populism can be appealling, the tone-deafness of all this is remarkable: was ever there was an election cycle -- beginning with the theft of the presidency, leading through a terrorist attack, a recession, the corporate scandals and an unnecessary, dishonestly advoctated, nightmarish war and occupation of a soveriegn country -- that screamed out not to be based on the other side's delightful hope and optimism?
But 2004 wasn't even necessarily a bumper year for bad sloganeering. Back in 2000, the Gore campaign, like its candidate, found itself caught between two opposing slogans, representing two opposing worldviews -- the earthy-lyrical, Stanley-Greenberg-approved "The people not the powerful" and the safe, New-Economy-buzzword, Mark Penn-approved "Keep the prosperity going". Nothing captures the conundrums of the Gore campaign better than these two phrases. Gore officially rolled out the first in his loving tribute to his southern progressive father at the 2000 convention, in almost-perfect-iambic quadrameter (And never in the years to come...did he forget the reason he entered public service -- to fight for the people, not the powerful). The problem with "the people" was that it was too personal, too combattive to repeat over and over on the campaign trail without eventually sounding silly, always a risk for Gore. It was also his one really good moment in the campaign and such things rarely last in politics. Typically, the conflict-loving press exascerbated the problem by unhelpfully changing the slogan to "The people versus the powerful", that extra syllable doing a lot to ruin things.
So Gore ended up falling back on the alternative tie into the Clinton years, the utterly forgettable "Keep the prosperity going". It reminded me a lot of a mattress warehouse somewhere that had gotten an overlarge shipment. "Great deals! Low, low prices! Keep the prosperity going with the Gore Democrats!" For a candidate with sincerity and/ or political-identity problems, this was just terrible. But in fact the slogan was so bad that even Clinton sounded oily rather than soothing while saying it out on the trail in the dying days of the campaign.
But the very worst slogan of my political life had to belong to Gore's primary opponent that year. Bill Bradley's campaign catch-phrase was, incredibly, "It can happen" (later amended to the more reasonable "Make it happen", but not until after New Hampshire.) Ask yourself this: If you were a neoliberal insurgent running against an incumbant vice president from a popular administration, what would you most want people to think? Would it really be something along the lines of "Bill Bradley? That guy from New Jersey? Huh, well It Can Happen I guess. I mean, last summer my brother finally got a job. We didn't see that one coming...
So where are the great Democratic slogan writers? Going back into the mists of time, there was Clinton's basically vapid but pitch-perfect, beating-them-at-their-own-game "Bridge to the Future" 1996 reelection campaign theme. Clinton's crowning touch was the "Bridge to the 21st Century" twist of his nominating speech, the perfect, if slightly cruel, rubuttal to Dole's proffered "bridge to the past". Clinton's 1992 slogan, "Our new covenant" was actually wonderful rather than just effective: an evoking of scripture, erudition, tantalizing promise and the ever-powerful theme of conquering and remaking the party in your image. On the other hand, that was arguably what Dean wanted to do in 2003 when he told us "You have the power!", and look where that got him (well, the Chairmanship, at least.)
With campaign slogans, as with everything, greatness is fleeting. But some basic competence, and ideology, would be good.
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