A Pilgrim’s Digression

Thursday night, I listened to Kerry’s speech on the radio. I did not watch it on TV. TV can be a distracting way to absorb a politician’s message because of the showmanship–and the showboating–that goes in to a speech. I wanted just the words. I don’t care about the images, what color tie he was wearing, whether he looked like Gomer Pyle when he saluted the crowd as he took the stage and said “reporting for duty.”

The words were pretty good. To get the negatives out of the way first, I rolled my eyes at the “born in the West Wing” joke. I’ve heard him say it before, and it’s pretty old by now. It wasn’t even funny the first time I heard it; it’s too made-to-order to believe or even laugh at. Of the speech generally, I would say that like all major political speeches, it is full of plans which are doubtful or unlikely to come anywhere near fruition. I said in a previous entry that politicians are “fictions,” and we vote for the fiction we want to believe in. I do believe that: we vote for the politician who presents to us the image of himself we want to believe, as well as the ideal society we would like to live in. Kerry did the latter in the “what if” portion of his speech near the end. I am cynical, in that I listen to these speeches and all I hear is verbiage. Does any of it mean anything? Probably not. I don’t expect Democrats to have accomplished much after four, or even eight years of a Kerry administration. After all, eight years of Clinton demonstrated that the worst fears of those of us on the Right never came true and perhaps were mere chimeras; I say that despite my animosity towards Clinton. But one has to decide on some criteria for voting. Kerry’s fiction is at least well-crafted and inspiring.

I particularly liked the note of optimism in Kerry’s speech. He said at one point, “We’re the optimists. For us, this is a country of the future.” Then he had to ruin those lines by going by adding one sentence too many: “We’re the can-do people.” I groaned at that, picturing a class of special ed students saying, “We’re not handicapped, we’re handicapable!” Other than that, he gave an good, optimistic speech, probably one of the better nomination acceptance speeches in American political history. He tried to unite Americans by reminding us how partisan walls fell soon after 9/11. He blamed the reerection of those walls on the Republicans, if only by implication, but overall his message was that Republican or Democrat, America belongs to us all, not just to one party. My summary judgment is that Kerry made a good case for himself. He seemed competent, optimistic, caring. He did not lay out any specifics for winning the war on Terrorism, but I’m not sure he had to. Everyone knows he would handle the war differently. Bush, by contrast, needs to present himself at his convention as having concrete plans for his second term. So far, he seems adrift, saying yesterday he has a “clear vision” for winning the war on terror. As if this statement were enough to reassure us. OK, so what is you ‘clear vision,’ President Bush? What’s next? Do we take down Iran now? Or what?

I extracted the following quote from a Post article on reaction among undecided voters to Kerry’s speech. Right now, President Bush should feel some fear. Kerry is keeping pace with him in this race, and it won’t take much for him to pull ahead of the President.

“He is not supposed to be full of energy,” said Greg Maurer, 37, an intellectual-property lawyer and a Catholic Republican from a military family. “He was energizing me. I felt like I need to go out and do something for the country.”

Maurer voted for Bush last time and said he would probably vote for him again — yet Kerry’s speech planted seeds of doubt. “You could picture him in the White House, and we would be proud he was there,” Maurer said. “I never had that image of him before.”