August 03, 2004

Review of John Kerry's acceptance speech, part one

The time has come to think seriously for a few moments about the upcoming election.

The nation's condition and future are, in many ways, at a more critical crossroads than we have seen since at least the 1980 election cycle, or maybe even before that; the starkness of contrast in our choices for president is commensurate with the seriousness of the consequences of our collective choice. If one considers our enemy--a band of Islamic fascists who are pleased to cut off the heads of their adversaries--it is not mere hyperbole to suggest that the very survival of our society, even of western civilization itself, would be cast seriously into question if this same band of gleeful murderers were to gain access to nuclear or biological weapons. Matters are just that serious, and we are faced with two main choices of how to deal with the future.

Anyone who has ever dropped by here knows my preference for president, and a few of the reasons why. But much of what is said on both sides of the body politic these days is mere rhetoric, sharp and snarky to be sure, but generally persuasive in an inverse relation to its snarkiness.

As much fun as these are to write and to read, they are politically inconsequential. Those whose minds are already made up enjoy producing and encountering opinions which amplify, refine, or explicate their own. But the election will ultimately come down to the yet-undecided middle voter. I address this effort to them: there are reasons, I believe compelling ones, why not only we should vote against John Kerry, but why we should vote for George Bush. These need to be assessed coolly and without the intensity of partisan championing. We collectively must decide how to progress based on what the future demands, not whose fault it is how we got where we are, or whether we agree or disagree with some or all the steps which eventuated in our present condition.

This will be the first in a series of essays to address specifically such few undecideds as may still be out there. The basis of these trifling essays will be remarks by both candidates, and what I hope to be an unimpassioned dissection of their meaning to an assessment of George Bush's first term; George Bush's prospective second term; and the prospective John Kerry presidency. To the extent possible, and as my humble basis of knowledge permits, we will reduce the arguments for and against to facts, not emotional appeals, and their evaluation in reference to first principles.

The first subject of these articles will be John Kerry's DNC acceptance speech. I don't intend for this to be a Fisking, and I will forego any cheap shots which present themselves.

The first big chunk of the speech is pretty unobjectionable, if also equally generic:

John Kerry Nomination acceptance speech, 7/29/2004 We are here tonight because we love our country.

We are proud of what America is and what it can become.

My fellow Americans, we are here tonight united in one simple purpose: to make America stronger at home and respected in the world.

A great American novelist wrote that you can't go home again. He could not have imagined this evening. Tonight, I am home. Home where my public life began and those who made it possible live. Home where our nation's history was written in blood, idealism, and hope. Home where my parents showed me the values of family, faith, and country.

Thank you, all of you, for a welcome home I will never forget.

I wish my parents could share this moment. They went to their rest in the last few years, but their example, their inspiration, their gift of open eyes, open mind, and endless world are bigger and more lasting than any words.

I was born in Colorado, in Fitzsimmons Army Hospital, when my dad was a pilot in World War II. Now, I'm not one to read into things, but guess which wing of the hospital the maternity ward was in? I'm not making this up. I was born in the West Wing!

My mother was the rock of our family, as so many mothers are. She stayed up late to help me do my homework. She sat by my bed when I was sick, and she answered the questions of a child who, like all children, found the world full of wonders and mysteries.

She was my den mother when I was a Cub Scout and she was so proud of her 50-year pin as a Girl Scout leader. She gave me her passion for the environment. She taught me to see trees as the cathedrals of nature. And by the power of her example, she showed me that we can and must finish the march toward full equality for all women in our country.

My dad did the things that a boy remembers. He gave me my first model airplane, my first baseball mitt and my first bicycle. He also taught me that we are here for something bigger than ourselves; he lived out the responsibilities and sacrifices of the greatest generation, to whom we owe so much.

When I was a young man, he was in the State Department, stationed in Berlin when it and the world were divided between democracy and communism. I have unforgettable memories of being a kid mesmerized by the British, French, and American troops, each of them guarding their own part of the city, and Russians standing guard on the stark line separating East from West. On one occasion, I rode my bike into Soviet East Berlin. And when I proudly told my dad, he promptly grounded me.

But what I learned has stayed with me for a lifetime. I saw how different life was on different sides of the same city. I saw the fear in the eyes of people who were not free. I saw the gratitude of people toward the United States for all that we had done. I felt goose bumps as I got off a military train and heard the Army band strike up "Stars and Stripes Forever." I learned what it meant to be America at our best. I learned the pride of our freedom. And I am determined now to restore that pride to all who look to America.


Here he invokes some of the spirit of Ronald Reagan, who made national pride a cornerstone of his beliefs, and who tried specifically to impart that to the American citizenry. In his farewell speech to the nation, he said particularly that "[O]ne of the things I'm proudest of in the past eight years [is] the resurgence of national pride that I called the new patriotism."

Consider for a moment the apparently different audiences Reagan and Kerry have for their appeals to national pride. John Kerry hopes to restore national pride to "all who look to America," certainly a curious choice of words if one is speaking primarily of the Americans themselves. This, perhaps, is an almost subconcious manifestation of Kerry's internationalist priorities: maybe he is directing his hope toward our traditional allies.

Reagan, conversely, continued his farewell speech thusly:

An informed patriotism is what we want. And are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world? Those of us who are over thirty-five or so years of age grew up in a different America. We were taught, very directly, what it means to be an American. And we absorbed, almost in the air, a love of country and an appreciation of its institutions. If you didn't get these things from your family, you got them from the neighborhood, from the father down the street who fought in Korea of the family who lost someone at Anzio. Or you could get a sense of patriotism from school. And if all else failed, you could get a sense of patriotism from the popular culture. The movies celebrated democratic values and implicitly reinforced the idea that America was special.

President Reagan was appealing to us Americans, and to history, to be proud of our own nation and the things it has stood for in the long march of history. And why? What, in fact, has our nation stood for in the long march of history? He continues:
America is freedom - freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise. And freedom is special and rare. It's fragile; it needs protection. ...
I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still.

This is a very vivid description of the America that many of us--myself among them--actually do see, and is quaintly charming in the utter lack of irony embodied in it. Many in our sophisticated and sometimes cynical society have, in fact, come to regard an unironic love for what America stands for as, well, simple. Certainly it shows no great skill or subtlety on the part of the commentator to somehow not find fault with his subject, though I would humbly submit that there is a pronounced uptick in the frequency with which fatuous remarks comparing the leader of the free world to Hitler are made when a Republican occupies the White House.

The implication Kerry makes is that, as we did at the end of the Carter administration, we have lost our national pride because of the failings of the current administration. But the "national malaise," in Reagan's phrase, was deep and dark in 1980 and an honest comparison with today's state of affairs is reassuring to us in our evaluation of our own condition.

The Vietnam war was still an unapologetic subject for discussion in 1980. It had ended just seven years prior, making it much nearer in recollection than our own remembrance of the first Gulf War. America had entered a war without much of a plan to win, had badly underestimated the enemy, and had lost 50,000 men--many of whom were conscripts--over a seemingly interminable ten-year conflict, before finally giving up amidst a near collapse of the government. The 900+ blessed dead in the current sixteen-month Iraq war--all volunteers to a professional military--does not really compare, and it is disingenuous to suggest otherwise.

The early 1980s economy floundered along lumpily. Unlike today, when silly remarks about our modern economy's status as the worst since the Great Depression receive standing ovations, there was true widespread economic suffering in the early 1980s. The numbers can be recited but hardly tell the whole story: unemployment peaked near 11% in 1982 and spent nineteen consecutive months at or above 9%; inflation cruised along at 10-12%. Renters found it nearly impossible to buy a home, with mortgage rates of 15%. The reality of this last figure alone is illuminating: a $100,000 home could be had today, assuming a 30-year fixed mortgage at 5.5%, for payments of $568 per month; that same home, for the same repayment term but at 15% interest rates, would cost $1264 per month, pricing it right out of reach of many would-be buyers.

Add the gas lines which resulted from the OPEC embargos, the Iranian hostages, and the bombing of our Marine barracks in Beirut, and it would be fair to say that we Americans had had a pretty rough time of things for the better part of a decade by the time things started to turn around in 1983. The economy right now is producing strong GDP growth (though the latest quarter, at 3%, is only average), 3% inflation, and 5.5% mortgage rates. Unemployment is a tad higher, at 5.6%, than what economists call full employment (5%). Job growth did lag unusually long during the present recovery--but more than a million net jobs have been created in the past ten months. Could be better? Sure. But it's not what you'd call a "national malaise."

So, then, where does this purported present lack of national pride come from? It's probably worth observing that it's not universal, but seems to be confined mostly to liberals who oppose many of George Bush's policies and initiatives, and derive too great a portion of their national pride from the opinions of some of our European allies. That Jacque Chirac and Gerhardt Schroeder have derided us as simplistic cowboys because of their disagreements with George Bush does not properly correlate to a diminution of national pride--except among those with an external locus of control, who allow their opinions to be influenced primarily by the opinions of others. It is not nearly so universal as John Kerry suggests, and frankly seems nothing more than an unusually intense manifestation of disagreement with political policy.

Next up: "restoring trust and credibility to the White House."

Posted by JKS at August 3, 2004 05:26 AM
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