Memo to George W. Bush
The making of a successful speech: an old boot, a lasso and love.
BY PEGGY NOONAN, former Reagan speechwriter.
And so it begins. Everything up to now has been winning the nomination
and meeting America. Next week the campaign proper starts. Just about
every voter in the country will, even if just for a moment, tune in to
watch your big speech Thursday night at the convention. It's been on
your mind in a big way for a long time. When I saw you two weeks ago,
you said you were in the fourth draft, working with the gifted Gerson
and Hughes and Rove. You were happy with the policy elements and
what you called the general thrust, but you keep reworking the text so
you can hear the sound of you in it.
Not that you think the sound of you is so beautiful, but it's you. You
have a vocabulary, a way of speaking, a way of using humor. It's your
style. And the speech has to be you or it won't succeed.
What is your sound? Direct, common, colloquial. A modern American man
from the West, with a life in business and politics. Flat, not soaring.
Almost dry and dusty. Dry and dusty as an old pair of cowboy boots.
That's what you want in the speech, something that's strong and tough
as an ol' boot, with a little color, a little fancy stitching, but not
too
much. Sharp slope on the heel, sharp toe to do some kicking.
* * *
You're sure the speech has to be good. You're right. A bad one will give
you a solid month of bad press and bad jokes. But don't worry too much
and overwork it. You know that a great acceptance speech doesn't
bring victory; a great acceptance speech gives meaning to victory. It
can even give a mandate. Victory is made of other things; usually in
politics you find victory in the day-to-day, not in the big moments. More
important is a good campaign. So far yours has been textbook.
And part of the campaign, the kickoff of the contest, is the speech. A
great acceptance speech defines what a candidacy is so that the
candidate and the voters together have the words that explain what the
election is about. The candidate internalizes the speech, explains himself
to himself with it. When it works, all his stray thoughts, ideas, policies
and proposals come together and hold together like a length of strong
rope. Like a lasso you can take hold of and throw out to a crowd.
So that's what you want, a boot and a lasso.
* * *
You want to tell people, "This is who I am. This is what I believe. These
are my intentions. This is why you want to come walk with me and be
part of this big thing I'm doing." And you have to do all that in about
45
minutes. Which is hard, especially when you remember that about 15 of
those minutes are sheer, spontaneous, happy applause. With, in your
case, a lot of whomp-em, stomp-em from the Texas delegation.
You want to flesh out compassionate conservatism, because it's at the
heart of what and who you are. In a way, compassionate conservatism
is a matter of facing the unfinished business of the 1980s. Back then,
President Reagan and your father had a lot to do, pushing down the
Berlin Wall, and many other walls. In the '80s the modern economy was
invented, taxes and regulation came tumbling down, money was freed
up, geniuses like Jobs and Gates and ten thousand others built the new
America.
We are living in the economy the men of the '80s made. It is one of the
great lies of the Clinton era that he did it. And you might, in speaking
of
this, use it as a refrain: "Bill Clinton didn't do this--you did it." Bill
Clinton, one wag has observed, was the car salesman on the floor when
the billionaire came in and bought a fleet of Caddies. He didn't make the
car; he didn't make the money that bought the car. He wrote up the
order and went out to dinner.
But with new wealth, and with what we've learned about what helps the
poor, and with the accumulated wisdom of 50 years of trying hard to
bring everyone along--with all that and in all that, compassionate
conservatism was born. It's a good thing. It's what in the Reagan White
House we used to call being a bleeding-heart conservative.
Talk about this. You have a refrain you use: "It's compassionate to want
to help the poorest children get a good education--but it's conservative
to demand standards and embrace choice and competition." Use that.
Every time you use it on the stump, people listen.
There's a phrase you've been using for a long time: "every willing heart."
You want to help create a society in which no one is left behind, in
which every willing heart gets the lift it needs. Use that too. It's you.
You have another refrain. I saw it at a speech in New York. "I'm runnin'
for a reason." You talk about something you want done, and then you
say, 'I'm runnin' for a reason," and the audience starts to clap. It made
me think that maybe you're influenced, in your speaking, by local
ministers in Texas churches. And again, it was natural to you.
* * *
You'll want to demonstrate somehow that you're a Texan born and bred.
I asked you the first time I talked to you what accounted for the
difference between your political perceptions and your father's. And you
said: "Midland, Texas."
Your dad as a boy went to Greenwich Country Day in a chauffeur-driven
limousine at the height of the Depression. At the same age you lived in
a
little suburban ranch house and played in the street in your undershirt
and jeans. You drove your bike through vacant lots. You didn't even
know your parents had money and standing until you were a teenager,
because they didn't live like they did.
When your father got out of the East and away from his family, from the
mother of tennis lessons and father of the three-piece suit, when he
went to war, he mixed with poor guys and normal guys and wealthy
guys, and he loved it. And he became a guy who gets up Sunday
morning and walks around in his boxers and makes scrambled eggs for
the kids. He became normal. You grew up normal. You breathed in Texas
with hungry lungs and became a Texan, because Texas is the kind of
place that has a soul to give, and that lets you become it.
You were spiky where the old man was smooth. You learned to lean back
on a chair with cowboy boots tilted. You grew up in a Texas where boys
wanted to be Hud, or James Dean and Rock Hudson in "Giant." That
great old movie, the official movie of Texas if you don't count "The Last
Picture Show," ends with a beautiful, sentimental little close-up: two
little babies in a crib, cousins, the Anglo baby and the Mexican baby.
Just like your family. So you've had a different experience and a very
American experience. If somehow you could summon or evoke or refer to
that. Well, Edna Ferber needed a whole novel, and you just have 45
minutes. But maybe some time in the future.
Anyway, about dad. And conservatism. It would be wonderful if you
could define what a modern conservative is. I asked you when I talked
to you that time why you are more conservative than your father, and
you looked surprised. You felt you weren't like some old-time
conservatives, that you feel strong compassion for people and look to
help them solve problems with conservative solutions. You see yourself
as a moderate, and your father as a moderate, but you don't think
you're moderate in the same way.
The old man was moderate in that he thought conservatives had certain
insights and liberals did too, and you make your choices weighing the
balance and considering the lay of the land, the play of the press, the
state of the polls, and your gut sense of what you can do. The old man
bowed to a lot of liberal assumptions.
But you don't. You're another generation, and a Texan. You don't think
the left has the moral high ground, you don't bow to their professed
intentions, because you're not sure they're their real intentions. You
suspect that mere power is the thing they want. You might want to talk
about some of this.
And you might think about this: You seem to have a particular Bush
virtue, a familial virtue that the old man has in spades. It is a softness
born of love. Love is what it's all about with the Bushes, a huge
affection that operates below the shrewdness, sourness and spite of
big-league politics, below the father-son competitiveness and the
brotherly competition. You all have soft hearts. It makes you all soft
in a
way that sometimes serves you well and sometimes doesn't. America's
going to love you eventually because you've got a soft heart; but you
better show in time that you're tough too, even hard, because
presidents sometimes have to be hard.
* * *
You probably don't want to dwell on Clinton. You get what he is, and
you don't like it much, and it's shrewd to ignore him. Your candidacy isn't
about opposing Clinton; it's about governing the country in a better,
healthier, principled way. You probably don't want to talk about Gore
either.
But consider whether you'd be doing the country a service if you would
take one sharp hard paragraph and define what Clintonism--and by
inference what Goreism--is and has been for our country. This might be
cleansing, and bracing. It also might have long-term benefits. Some of
the chickens Clinton-Gore let out of the yard will roost in your White
House. It might be good now to lay the predicate of what he did and
didn't do. And it's not as if people won't believe you. They know who he
is. Anger and conviction could make you too sharp, or too sarcastic,
when you speak of this. Avoid that. Speak of it as what it is, and was:
a
tragedy for our country, a tragedy whose last echoes are yet unheard.
* * *
One way to make your views and intentions clear is obvious to you, and
I'll be listening to hear it. When you are the governor of a state you
lead
that state. You're not one voice of many in a Senate; you're the man
who makes the decisions in the statehouse. Make the right decisions and
the state can flourish; make the wrong ones and it can't. People judge
on the record. Tell us your record. Tell us what you did or tried to do
in
Texas, and what you mean to do for the country.
But back to the most important thing, something I mentioned earlier.
Nothing works long-term in politics but love. Of course, you can win
quick victories, even a series of them, through demagoguery, jabbing,
fighting, even hating. But all enduring victories, all administrations
with
meaning, have love at the heart of them. Ronald Reagan loved America;
that's why he felt so protective of it, wanted it to be strong and rich.
Your old man loved America. And the Bushes have the love thing. That
time in New Hampshire when your father came out to help you, and hurt
you instead--"this son of mine, this boy"--the whole event collapsed
because you were supposed to make a speech but seeing and hearing
your father made your eyes fill up and you couldn't speak. And you
never told why it didn't work afterward, because you didn't want to hurt
the old man--who, like Joe Kennedy, wants to be part of this.
Look at your father's book of letters. The whole subtext--family,
country, children--is all about love.
You Bushes, under the Brooks Brothers you're all wearing it on your
sleeve. And you, since you became a Christian, for you love is bigger
now and deeper.
Honest love is a beautiful thing. Let it infuse your speech. As a matter
of
fact, Dwight Eisenhower, as I recall, once ended one of his big speeches
with that very word: "love." Reagan did once too. That's a little tradition
worth continuing. Just your little one-word nod to the family you came
from and the nation you wish to lead.