IN SUMMARY

BY HENDRIK HERTZBERG

Early electronic The New Yorker magazine

September 3, 2008
Denver Redux
During one of the musical interludes at Invesco Field Thursday afternoon, as we basked in the sunlit bleachers awaiting the big moment, a younger friend—one wise and kind enough to understand how much your typical old-timer enjoys this sort of question—asked me what I thought was the greatest speech I’d ever heard live, in person.
Let’s see. Well, son, there was Adlai Stevenson at the New York State Liberal Party rally in 1956—but, to be honest, I was too small to take in much beyond the film-noir feel of the grimy old Madison Square Garden on West 50th Street, the deafening roar of the besotted crowd, the shine of Adlai’s bald pate, and the reedy, grown-up sound of his urbane voice. There was Bobby Kennedy at the 1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, but that wasn’t a speech, it was an investiture, a deification, a full-immersion baptism of tears—the point wasn’t anything Bobby said, it was the ovation that greeted him. There was Allard Lowenstein’s astounding off-the-cuff talk at the 1967 National Student Congress, a passionate, exhilarating oration that launched what became the Dump Johnson movement. There was an unusually rousing stump speech I heard Sargent Shriver, McGovern’s running mate, give in the Stuyvesant High School auditorium on the eve of the 1972 Nixon landslide. Fast-forwarding a bit, Barack Obama’s little talk in 2000 wasn’t too shabby, either.
But I guess the best speech I ever heard in person—for sure, the best formal speech in person at a convention—was Mario Cuomo’s keynote at the 1984 gathering in San Francisco. Cuomo’s substance was no great shakes. His “tale of two cities” theme wasn’t exactly the freshest of literary references, and his policy ideas were mostly golden oldies from the New Deal era. But the total effect, the gestalt, was overwhelming. Cuomo was like Pavarotti at La Scala, only more so. For an audience of Democrats demoralized by years of fecklessness, petty squabbling, and weakness at the top, there was something like ecstasy in surrendering to the unfamiliar sensations of strength and confidence. Cuomo made it possible to imagine that one could be a Democrat and still be master of one’s fate.
A couple of hours later, after the sun had set and the air had cooled and the stadium had become an immense tureen of sparkling humanity under the night sky, Obama gave his speech. It wasn’t like Cuomo’s aria in 1984 or Obama’s own bildungsroman in 2004. An acceptance speech is a harder formal challenge than a keynote. It certainly was for Obama, who was under justifiable pressure to serve some meat and potatoes along with the visionary strawberries and cream. Obama’s was the best acceptance speech I’ve ever heard, and I’ve heard a bunch. With his usual perspicacity, Remnick gets it right:
Obama has been more moving at the lectern—at the Convention in Boston four years ago, when he relied mainly on the story of his modest, yet remarkable, multicultural upbringing; at the victory party after the breakthrough win in Iowa, last January—but he has never described himself and his political vision with more clarity.
Again, Obama’s speech wasn’t as thrilling as Cuomo ‘84, but it shared the quality of mastery. Obama effortlessly took in hand an even vaster audience and imbued it with his own serene sureness and seriousness.
It wasn’t just the speech, though. Obama’s whole Convention was an exercise in mastery.
Going in, it wasn’t just in “the media” that you heard talk that Obama had caved by giving two nights—half the Convention!—to The Clintons, that Obama was in danger of “looking weak,” that there wouldn’t be time for a night devoted to a tough assault on the Republicans, that the Kerry mistake of four years ago, when speakers were forbidden to say mean things about George W. Bush, was about to be repeated. A good many Democrats had exactly those worries, compounded by the certainty (in their minds) that the Republican Convention the following week would be a festival of Obama-bashing.
It didn’t turn out that way. The Convention (in my opinion) was perfect, with each night’s arc building to a satisfying peak.
Monday was pure emotion, expressed through a pageant of families. The appearance of the only surviving brother and the only surviving child of President Kennedy was the sepia-toned overture to the technicolor Obamas. Mario Cuomo, in that speech twenty-four years ago, spoke brilliantly of “the family of America.” That was metaphor; this was fact. That was aspiration; this was fulfillment. E Pluribus Unum meets Novus Ordo Seclorum.
The notion that Tuesday and Wednesday nights had somehow been hijacked by the Clintons turned out to be simply silly. Hillary Clinton was Tuesday’s principal speaker, and it felt quite natural that she should be: after all, she had won nearly as many votes as Obama, she had nearly as many delegates as Obama, and her policy views are nearly identical to Obama’s. It felt even more natural that Bill Clinton was a featured speaker the following night: after all, he’s not just Hillary Clinton’s husband. He’s the most successful and popular President of the past twenty years, the only Democrat to serve two full terms since F.D.R., and a superb speaker. It helped, of course, that both their speeches—his especially—were so good.
There had been worries about Thursday, the final night, too—especially the decision to move it to Invesco, the “Mile High Stadium” of the Denver Broncos. It would be too much like a rock concert, some people fretted—or, worse, a Nuremberg Rally. Obama as Jagger, directed by Reifenstahl—this we don’t need. Or Obama might seem too small, lost in all that space, a tiny, distant figure. Or it might rain. Or the plywood Doric columns around the stage would look pretentious, like the “Presidential” seal the campaign once tried and quickly abandoned.
All such worries turned out to be groundless. Invesco Field, for all its immensity, has an uncannily intimate feel. Its lines are sinuous and graceful, curving gently to hold the crowd like a cupped hand. The size of the crowd changed its nature. The addition of sixty-five thousand more or less ordinary citizens to the Pepsi Center’s twenty thousand political obsessives turned the live audience into a much more accurate and agreeable microcosm of the forty million (!) watching from “out there.” And the speech did everything an acceptance speech can do.
Overall, the Convention was amazingly dignified, grown-up, good-humored, and coherent. There was a distinct lack of ugliness in the criticisms of McCain and the Republicans. On the whole, the intellectual and rhetorical quality of the speeches was high—considerably higher than I remember from past conventions. The Democratic Party treated the American people with respect.
All the speeches, by the way, may be seen on the Convention’s first-rate Web site, which offers excellent video and audio quality. If by some chance you happen to have missed Michelle Obama (Monday), John Kerry (Wednesday), or Al Gore (Thursday), this is the place to remedy your omission. I’d also recommend Jim Leach (Monday), Brian Schweitzer (Tuesday), Beau Biden (Wednesday), and anybody else you’re curious about. The films that introduced speakers and highlighted issues were unusually good, and these too may be found on the site. Perhaps most of all, I’d recommend the eight short talks which preceded Obama’s acceptance on Thursday. The speakers were “ordinary Americans”—and I know how deadly that sounds. But these supposedly everyday people put the pros to shame. You may have to hunt around the site a bit to find them; they’re grouped under the heading “American Voices Program.” It’s worth the search.
Posted by Hendrik Hertzberg
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