They did. Bush and advisers had chosen the GOP event as an opportunity to unveil his new stump speech for his reelection campaign. After months of feigning indifference to electoral politics while Democrats pounded away at his record, the president was finally in the arena, telling the country why he deserved four more years in office. The speech he delivered was broad and expansive–reflecting on his record in issues foreign and domestic and looking forward to the challenges to come. He didn’t name any of his opponents but he came after them all the same, joking about a “senator from Massachusetts” (read: John Kerry) who, Bush claimed, had waffled on the most important issues of the day.
Rhetoric matters in a presidential campaign. A single phrase, finely worded and well delivered, can shape the debate for an entire election cycle. A single sentence can crystallize the ways a candidate seems disingenuous or out of touch. To assess Bush’s new campaign oratory, NEWSWEEK’s Jonathan Darman talked to David Kusnet the morning after the Governors Association speech. As Bill Clinton’s chief speechwriter from 1992-94, Kusnet knows a thing or two about stump speeches himself. Excerpts:
NEWSWEEK: What surprised you about the speech?
David Kusnet: That it was well done. That wouldn’t have surprised me until after the State of the Union [last month], when President Bush and his handlers seemed to have lost their touch. In a sense you could call it ‘Dubya’s Do-over,’ because the State of the Union was the most partisan and pedestrian speech that he’s ever given. Now he’s giving his stump speech and it was more presidential, in addition to being more effectively politically, than his State of the Union speech was.
Do you think last night’s speech was reacting to some of the criticism that went into the State of the Union?
I don’t know. The State of the Union–not only wasn’t it presidential, it was not even effective as politics. It was defensive. As Winston Churchill said of a dessert that he refused to eat, “this pudding has no theme”; there was no theme to it. Pretty much it was litany of responses to attacks by the Democrats and doubts by the electorate.
But the stump speech did have a theme.
This one did have a theme by talking about the ownership society. I don’t happen to agree with either his program or his arguments for it, but that is a way of presenting many of his domestic initiatives under one headline.
What were the particularly presidential parts of this stump speech?
I think first, having a semblance of a unifying idea for his domestic policy–the ownership society. That’s something that effective presidents, whether [Ronald] Reagan on the right or Franklin Roosevelt on the left have done, is present ideas, not just proposals. [The ownership society] is an idea. I would say the way he attacked Kerry, by inference at the beginning, when he was talking about the race for the Democratic nomination, [where he said] that you have so many different views, for NAFTA and against NAFTA, for the Iraq war and against the Iraq war–and that’s only from one senator from Massachusetts. That’s attacking your opponent with a switchblade disguised as a scalpel, as opposed to with a blackjack.
Isn’t that risky for a sitting president to do?
I don’t think so. I think the much greater risk is being your own hatchet man. He’s going to have other people be his hatchet man.
But he was pretty blatantly going after Kerry.
Right, but Kerry’s running against him, it’s fair game. And that’s the way a Roosevelt or a Reagan or a Clinton would have attacked an opponent, by having some humor, some humor and some lightness about it.
And that’s not the way Bush has handled himself previously?
Well, in the State of the Union, while he wasn’t mentioning anyone by name he was being very harsh in how he treated his critics. Before then, I think in substance Bush’s presidency has been partisan, ideological and divisive. But I think his rhetoric before the most recent State of the Union was not partisan. Other than perhaps speaking at Republican functions, I don’t think you ever heard Bush use the word “Republican” or the word “Democrat,” the word “liberal” or even the word “conservative.” His rhetoric was unifying even if his policies were divisive. Then with this year’s State of the Union, his rhetoric became as divisive as his policies.
So the stump speech is a return to the old approach.
It’s ironic because the stump speech is supposed to be more political than the State of the Union. With the stump speech, he’s being political, but he’s doing it a deft way. As Franklin Roosevelt said of Al Smith, he’s being the happy warrior.
And that’s got to be pretty helpful to Bush when the Democrats have come after him so hard in the last couple months.
Right. I think it was a good stump speech.
Was there anything in there that was risky, that’s going to come back to haunt him?
I think what’s going to come back to him is his record. Rhetoric and strategy only get you so far when the country has lost three million jobs and when the best jobs are being outsourced and off-shored… I think it’s much less risky than the approach he took in the State of the Union speech. In the State of the Union speech, he used the standard incumbent’s speech of saying, ‘Do you want to go forward or do you want to go backward?’ The problem is that if by backward he meant the America and the economy he inherited, why not go backward? Why not go backward to near full employment, to rising wages, to federal surpluses as far as the eye could see? Compared to where we are now that’s a very desirable place to go back to. That’s not what he talked about last night. Last night he talked about a philosophical difference, not forward/backward.
What was going on with the State of the Union? Why did they mess that up so badly?
It’s hard to imagine a competent speechwriter producing that, producing something like that State of the Union. Bush has good speechwriters. My guess is that the criticism of him really got to him… My guess would be that he and the speechwriters probably kept going back and forth where they probably gave him something that was much better rhetorically but which, I can almost hear him saying, “But they’re killing us on this. You’ve gotta answer that.” And it ended up answering everything that was ever said about him. But no president wants to go before both houses of Congress and the American people [via] television and just get up and offer a litany of answers to attacks on him.
Did you ever have that problem with President Clinton?
He would often say, especially during the campaign but also in the administration, that we were “getting killed” on thus and so, but he also understood that the best defense was to talk about people’s lives and to talk about a positive vision for improving their lives. He never needed any convincing that you had to be positive when you went before the country.
Did it surprise you that Iraq wasn’t more prominently featured in the stump speech?
The way he’s discussing Iraq is by situating it in the response to September 11. From a rhetorical point of view, he did this right in the State of the Union speech too. First he talks about September 11, then he talks about the country coming together in response to terrorism, then he talks about the war in Afghanistan and the removal of the Taliban, then he talks about Iraq. And then he’ll talk about something else. He’ll talk about Libya foreswearing weapons of mass destruction. He’ll talk about the continuing war against Al Qaeda. He’ll talk about other things. So he situates Iraq in the context of the response to September 11 and in a context where most of what has been done has been more successful than what has been done in Iraq so far.
How much is this speech going to change over the next couple of months?
With any stump speech, it’s varied from audience to audience and it’s varied from issue to issue. So you can imagine him giving that speech and talking more about the economy, or talking more about education, or talking more about energy, or talking more about the war on terrorism. And it’s also varied according to the thrust of the debate. So a few months from now, assuming, as seems likely, John Kerry is the Democratic nominee, you can imagine Kerry says something on Tuesday and Bush gives the [stump] speech on Wednesday but it will include a response to what Kerry said on Tuesday.
But are there any lines that will stay in the speech no matter what audience he’s talking to?
I think the line about “the choice between a government that encourages ownership and opportunity and responsibility or a government that takes your money and makes your choices.” If I were going to make the case for Republican domestic policies in one line, that’s as good a line as any.
Not everyone would agree with all the claims Bush made in his Governors Association speech. What’s the standard for truth in a stump speech?
You don’t want to say something that’s verifiably wrong. You don’t want to claim that 2.5 million jobs were created in your administration and then, two hours later, AP moves a story that says 2.5 million jobs were lost in your administration… You also don’t want to say something that people are going to believe from their own life experience is false. If you’re the elder George Bush going around the country in 1992 saying, “We’re in a recovery,”–that did not square with what people had been experiencing in their own lives.
Any great lines in last night’s speech?
This is a great line: “We saw war and grief arrive on a quiet September morning.” That’s beautiful language. The only three syllable word is “September.” The only two syllable words are “morning,” “quiet” and “arrive.” That’s good, simple, graceful language.
