It’s an exaggeration to say that liberals ever controlled the Democratic Party, but by any measure, holding them down to a single hour’s speechifying has to mark a new low.
As the party’s presidential nominees drift sporadically rightward, however, the liberal hour has a clear logic to it. Anything longer than an hour would suggest that the party is holding two separate conventions in the same hall. At the same time, it is a safety valve, giving the delegates — a good four-fifths of them liberals — something they can actually cheer for.
This convention’s liberal hour, a Tuesday-night entr’acte, featured Jesse, Teddy and Bill (Bradley, not Clinton). It was gloriously off-message. For an hour, there was not a single reference to retiring the debt. The Clinton-Gore paroxysms of prosperity received their due mention, but it was mainly the negative that was accentuated. This was the moment for delegates to hear about those 44 million Americans without health care, 13 million of them children; those people who mop the floors for the minimum wage; those seniors who can’t afford to fill their prescriptions. This was the moment for a cry of justice, reduced, of course, to a brief yelp. This was, in short, the moment for a real Democratic speech.
No one among the convention planners having mastered the basics of Aristotle’s Poetics, the hour began with its climax. Shortly before 6:00 pm, Jesse Jackson came to the podium. The liberal hour, I should add, was discontinuous: Jackson’s speech was followed by an hour of the kind of drivel that only a high-priced consultant could cook up. But Jesse went on pre — prime time, no doubt solely because he actually had something to say.
A Jackson speech begins in fits and starts, a dozen little streams burbling along; it ends, invariably, as a verbal-emotional Niagara. He started, as did countless speakers at this convention, by talking about the convention of forty years ago. But for Jackson, that provided just enough occasion to sound the themes of the sixties. He moved on to the ticket, and while many have tried, only Jackson has succeeded in making the Lieberman nomination seem like a genuine breakthrough in civil rights. Then he veered way off-message by calling for a moratorium on the death penalty, and immediately the delegates responded with cheers that rocked the hall. The line had come like water to a parched desert wanderer: These were people who had surrendered all hope of ever again hearing a controversial moral position — let alone one they shared — at a national convention. Anyone watching would conclude that while the party’s leaders may have moved rightward, the party’s base was still a bunch of unreconstructed bleeding-heart pinkos. Which is precisely why Jackson came on one hour before the networks’ coverage began.
Jesse, of course, is the party’s best phrasemaker, and tonight he took out after the "grisly old Republicans" whom the GOP kept under wraps at Philadelphia: Helms, Lott, DeLay, Armey, Barr, Thurmond. He recounted the sins of Old George, Young Jeb and W., leading the crowd in a chant of "Keep out of the Bushes!" It was wonderful, and then it was over.
Ted Kennedy is not only America’s senior liberal. He is also the last public figure of any ideology who still has a distinct convention voice. When Ted Kennedy addresses a convention, he booms; his voice, at once formal, high and guttural, fills the hall. It is the one voice you can still imagine rising from a clamorous floor during a fight on platform or credentials, and silencing the room with the cry of "Mr. Speaker!" The New Dems, the neos, call Kennedy a paleo-liberal for his support of such chestnuts as universal health insurance. (The New Dem position is managed scarcity.) He certainly has a paleo-liberal — really, a paleo-political — manner of speech.
It sounded particularly paleo on Tuesday night, since Kennedy fluffed any number of good lines. Young Ted and Middle-Aged Ted were almost flawless orators when convention time rolled around, but Old Ted (he’s sixty-eight) mangled line after line. Still, he boomed away, reassuring the old that Al Gore would protect their Medicare, railing at HMOs that have entrusted their patients’ care to "number-crunchers sitting at computer screens hundreds of miles away." He called the choice between Bush and Gore one in which we will either "comfort the comfortable, or...strengthen the fabric of this country for Allll Americans." He said that Al Gore was fighting against the "old ways that favor the few at the expense of the many." He vowed to make "this new century a new progressive era," and said that future generations would look back on this convention and say, "It was here that we secured the right to health care for all citizens." In message and manner, that is, he sounded more like old Albert Gore than Young Al.
And the crowd loved it. This was not only the old Democratic politics, it was the old Democratic phrases and cadences. Kennedy has given many speeches that were far more moving, but this one was a kick. In a setting where all rough edges are smoothed away, he was, even in his fluffs, defiantly retro. Kennedy now embodies the shock of the old, for which the delegates plainly pine.
Bill Bradley has never been as loud in his entire life as Ted Kennedy is at least twice in every paragraph. So it fell to Bradley to put a quiet coda on the liberal hour. He came to the podium waving to the crowd in his tentative fashion, exhibiting a shyness that’s never seemed to afflict the Kennedys for a moment. Bradley began by praising Al Gore. He said, "When you run against someone, you get to know him very well," and for a moment the crowd fell silent, fearing that, just maybe, Bradley would actually relate what he came to know of Gore on the primary trail. He didn’t, of course, and, all anxiety lifted, the delegates settled back to hear a third talk on America’s unfulfilled promises, seven and one-half years into the Clinton administration. In a single sentence early on, Bradley called the Democrats the party that cared for the ill, lifted millions from poverty, healed the wounds of the racial divide. The nation of winners that Bill and Al had created was nowhere to be seen; we were back among the lame and the halt. Bradley even took a line from Roosevelt himself, noting, "Tonight, nearly one-fifth of the children in this country are ill-fed, ill-housed and ill-educated." (FDR had said that one-third of the nation was ill-fed, ill-clothed and ill-housed.)
As he demonstrated on the campaign trail, Bradley is no spellbinder. He won bursts of applause, but these came when he pledged to make the Democrats the party of campaign-finance reform and of a new war on poverty. He won the crowd on policy (often the case during his campaign) and lost it on style (always the case). A few minutes into his talk, there was a distinct buzz in the hall: Kennedy was gone, and some delegates had resumed their conversations. Bradley quoted Martin Luther King Jr.’s line that the reason the civil rights movement hadn’t occurred sooner was "the silence of good people." That was not a problem during Bradley’s speech.
Then Harold Ford Jr., a sprightly thirty-year-old congressman from Tennessee, came to the mike to deliver the keynote address. "Imagine a debt-free economy so strong that everyone shares in the American Dream," he said. No one applauded. The chatter among delegates rose to a roar. The liberal hour was over.
This article first appeared in LA Weekly.