Pulpit power.
I just finished watching Bush's Katrina response speech from New Orleans. It just underscores what I thought all throughout the 2004 campaign: Bush has improved exponentially as a speaker in his five years in the top seat. And it sounds like they brought the big guns (i.e. Michael Gerson) out for this one what with all the soaring, inoffensively religious come-together imagery. Gerson or not, whoever wrote this address was absolutely right to provide Bush with a substantive-sounding, responsive-government, New Democrat-sounding speech (at a time when people want lots of substance, a responsive, authoritative government, and, even if they don't know it, New Democrats.)
Still, I always find the first minute of a Bush speech feels like the moment after getting splashed with cold water. Can this be for real? Then I sort of settle into it. Yes, yes, of course it's for real. And it's even going to sound pretty good by the time he's done.
Speechmaking is so frigging important in US politics. The Big Speech -- the nomination acceptance, the inaugural, the SOTU/S, the post-disaster address -- make and break pols. A competent speech wipes out the effects of all sorts of actual real-world incompetence. That Bush talks substance makes up for a giant chunk of the fact that he has none. That he sounds concerned when he says the word "poverty" (oooh, the fourth rail!) makes us forget that he's done next to nothing to ameleorate it (by, say supporting an increase in the minimum wage or refundable tax credits, or an expansion of health care access) since the last time he sounded concerned about it, during the 2000 campaign. That he says the words "I consider detailed emergency planning to be a national security priority" obliterates the fact that his administration handed over the Federal Emergency Management Agency to a bunch of useless campaign hacks, spun wildly about their initial response to the disaster as people died, and tried to shift blame to the Louisiana Democrats, and then to the hapless fall-guy, Michael Brown. Bush insists, in the most earnest tones imaginable, that the response was as good as could be expected. And just like that, in the minds of many, it was.
It's a depressingly good speech. The affirmation of government; the acceptance of responsibility; the invocation of history; even the occasional change of inflection, of cadence. It's steady leadership in times of change. At moments, it sounds exactly like what I voted for when I cast my ballot against Bush. That what he's saying is as fake as snow in a can makes basically no difference, unless, like me, you're in the 40% or so of the voting public whose minds have been made up about Bush for six years already. And even then, it's really only at the very end, when Bush says "And may God bless America" in that "Let's roll" voice of his that you catch a hint of that insolent, willfully clueless swagger that made him so fucking insufferable when he was first on the national political scene back in 1999.
It's times like this when being leaderless is a really huge problem for the Democrats. Bill Clinton is on board raising money for relief efforts and his partisan hands are tied. I adore Nancy Pelosi and admire Harry Reid but they haven't got the rhetorical ability, or the Gerson-power in their stable, to effectively answer this sort of rhetorical intoxicant. Joe Biden might be able to do it, but he's already been overexposed this week during the Roberts hearings. John Edwards does empathy well (and what he says about poverty is so much more authentic than what Bush says on the subject, it's almost surreal), but empathy isn't what the Dems need to convey right now. Howard Dean, Al Gore, Russ Feingold and Jimmy Carter all convey partisan or ideological connotations that would undermine the effectiveness of their rebuttal. Joe Lieberman would be perfect, but, well, who am I kidding? That leaves, among the Dems who could actually get air time, either John Kerry, Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. I hope one of them has an answer to this.
Update: Too fucking perfect. According to David Kuznet at TNR, it wasn't Gerson who wrote the masterpiece. It was Bush's new head speechwriter, William McGurn. Just how completely phony was the speech? McGurn is a former editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page! All that big-government-conservatism, your-government-is-there-for-you pap Bush was spouting had been penned by one of those WSJ drown-it-in-the-bathtub, government-is-the-enemy hyper-libertarians, whose ex-colleagues have, among other things, been urging Bush to use Katrina as an excuse to push school vouchers on the exiled flood victims moving into other communities! Oh Democrats, Democrats, wherefore art thou?
Still, I always find the first minute of a Bush speech feels like the moment after getting splashed with cold water. Can this be for real? Then I sort of settle into it. Yes, yes, of course it's for real. And it's even going to sound pretty good by the time he's done.
Speechmaking is so frigging important in US politics. The Big Speech -- the nomination acceptance, the inaugural, the SOTU/S, the post-disaster address -- make and break pols. A competent speech wipes out the effects of all sorts of actual real-world incompetence. That Bush talks substance makes up for a giant chunk of the fact that he has none. That he sounds concerned when he says the word "poverty" (oooh, the fourth rail!) makes us forget that he's done next to nothing to ameleorate it (by, say supporting an increase in the minimum wage or refundable tax credits, or an expansion of health care access) since the last time he sounded concerned about it, during the 2000 campaign. That he says the words "I consider detailed emergency planning to be a national security priority" obliterates the fact that his administration handed over the Federal Emergency Management Agency to a bunch of useless campaign hacks, spun wildly about their initial response to the disaster as people died, and tried to shift blame to the Louisiana Democrats, and then to the hapless fall-guy, Michael Brown. Bush insists, in the most earnest tones imaginable, that the response was as good as could be expected. And just like that, in the minds of many, it was.
It's a depressingly good speech. The affirmation of government; the acceptance of responsibility; the invocation of history; even the occasional change of inflection, of cadence. It's steady leadership in times of change. At moments, it sounds exactly like what I voted for when I cast my ballot against Bush. That what he's saying is as fake as snow in a can makes basically no difference, unless, like me, you're in the 40% or so of the voting public whose minds have been made up about Bush for six years already. And even then, it's really only at the very end, when Bush says "And may God bless America" in that "Let's roll" voice of his that you catch a hint of that insolent, willfully clueless swagger that made him so fucking insufferable when he was first on the national political scene back in 1999.
It's times like this when being leaderless is a really huge problem for the Democrats. Bill Clinton is on board raising money for relief efforts and his partisan hands are tied. I adore Nancy Pelosi and admire Harry Reid but they haven't got the rhetorical ability, or the Gerson-power in their stable, to effectively answer this sort of rhetorical intoxicant. Joe Biden might be able to do it, but he's already been overexposed this week during the Roberts hearings. John Edwards does empathy well (and what he says about poverty is so much more authentic than what Bush says on the subject, it's almost surreal), but empathy isn't what the Dems need to convey right now. Howard Dean, Al Gore, Russ Feingold and Jimmy Carter all convey partisan or ideological connotations that would undermine the effectiveness of their rebuttal. Joe Lieberman would be perfect, but, well, who am I kidding? That leaves, among the Dems who could actually get air time, either John Kerry, Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. I hope one of them has an answer to this.
Update: Too fucking perfect. According to David Kuznet at TNR, it wasn't Gerson who wrote the masterpiece. It was Bush's new head speechwriter, William McGurn. Just how completely phony was the speech? McGurn is a former editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page! All that big-government-conservatism, your-government-is-there-for-you pap Bush was spouting had been penned by one of those WSJ drown-it-in-the-bathtub, government-is-the-enemy hyper-libertarians, whose ex-colleagues have, among other things, been urging Bush to use Katrina as an excuse to push school vouchers on the exiled flood victims moving into other communities! Oh Democrats, Democrats, wherefore art thou?
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