political conventions - put on a happy face

8/3/2019 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



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.

136 PUT ON A H APPY F ACE



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

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