It was Mario Cuomo, no mean orator, who said, “You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.” His point was that votes are won by painting emotive pictures — an inspiring vision of a better future or, if your opponent wins, a nightmarish forecast of decline. But ultimately the hard work of daily governing is the prosaic nuts and bolts, blocking and tackling of legislating.
As 2020 looms, we have yet to hear much poetry from the democratic candidates, but we all recall a few phrases that show how one can win hearts and change minds. They may not contain literal truth, but they offer emotional sustenance.
FDR in the depths of the Depression made a nation believe “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
At a time of American isolationism, he used a homely metaphor to make providing arms to an embattled Britain palateable. If a neighbor’s house was on fire, wouldn’t we loan him a garden hose to put it out? Of course. Thus Lend-Lease was born.
JFK made his election seem as inevitable as a baton changing hands in a relay race by speaking of a torch passing to a new generation. Reagan inspired patriotic feelings by calling America a shining city on a hill, though he meant something quite different than John Winthrop had in his gloss on the Sermon on the Mount 350 years earlier.
Of course demagogues also resort to resonate metaphors. The Nazis likened Jews to lice, echoed lately by Trump’s denigration of various minorities, and Reagan installed in voters’ minds his mythological welfare queen, bilking hard working taxpayers due to government stupidity
A phrase like “drain the swamp” can have a long and wildly mixed pedigree. It seems to have originated as a progressive era, socialist criticism of a cruel alligator-infested capitalist system. Seventy years later the swamp had morphed into a metaphor for liberal government bureaucracy run amok, according to conservatives, notably Reagan, Pat Buchanan and now Trump.
It is ironic that Trump has recently attacked progressive democratic women for hating America and saying “if they have a problem with our country…they should leave.” His rhetoric has been more relentlessly negative than any previous president’s.
Yes, his slogan, once again cribbed from Reagan in his Morning in America, reelection mode, is Make America Great Again, but his descriptions of the country have been dominated by doom and dystopia.
He began his campaign inveighing against Mexican rapists, murderers and drug traffickers streaming across our southern border like sci-fi zombies. His inaugural address, usually an occasion for starry-eyed optimism and uplight, was an attack on an establishment that protected itself while neglecting downtrodden, forgotten man and woman, itself a recycled trope from the Great Depression.
He painted a hellscape of rusted out factories like “tombstones,” mothers and children “trapped in poverty in our inner cities,” crime, gangs, drugs, and “American carnage.” And his solution for this misery was isolationism, walls against aliens of all sorts, distrust of other countries, races, religions, and the many enemies within.
Those enemies are easily identified. Anyone who disagrees with Trump — Democrats, the press, minorities, migrants, scholars, cosmopolitans, the charitable, the benevolent, the just and believers in the rule of law, beginning with the Constitution.
A third of the nation apparently enjoys Trump’s dark, bully boy, theater of the absurd, but the other two-thirds, one would like to hope, would probably welcome a little optimism and uplift, and plausible solutions to our problems, ones that don’t depend on demonizing our fellow Americans while covering up the conning of the poor to benefit the rich.
So far, however, the two dozen Democratic heroes and heroines who are supposedly riding to the rescue have been campaigning in pretty pedestrian prose, sometimes in great swathes of green eyeshade detail. Both Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders put the other candidates to shame with their command of economic facts and figures, but man does not live by spreadsheets alone.
Data and specialized knowledge are needed to govern, but to win, as the old song says, you gotta have heart. George Will, hardly an emotive character, nevertheless once argued at book length, that statecraft was actually a kind of soulcraft.
Trump works to embitter the soul, to appeal to fear and hatred. A few feisty Democrats like Kamala Harris have protested sharply, but do we want merely a cage match for the next year and a half?
Many of the candidates are, like Trump, in over their heads. Others are so afraid of making a misstep that they aren’t running for office so much as tiptoeing. Timidity won’t win an enthusiastic following. Neither will following the leader or imitating others.
If you haven’t got a persona people are inspired to follow, you are in the wrong business. If you can’t explain why you’re the one to take on Trump, you shouldn’t be entrusted with the job.
That said, running for president isn’t a street corner lemonade stand. It is a gigantic undertaking. The candidate is its face and ought to be its genius, in the original sense of an attendant spirit. But an army of aides are required to mount the production. Hair and make up, travel planners, pollsters, speech writers.
Winging it is for born orators, egomaniacs, or fools. One ill-considered remark and the show closes out of town. The only thing worse than appearing scripted is appearing idiotic, ill-prepared or inarticulate. Politics may be soulcraft, but it is also stagecraft and salesmanship.
Does this mean the well-prepared candidate is a fraud? No more than a user of a trainer or a spa is a fraud. They are enhancing their personal reality. Candidates should never forget the wisdom attributed to Samuel Goldwyn, among others, “The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you’ve got it made.”
Surely one of several dozen Democrats running, (with the help of their team) can express in a clear, memorable, persuasive way why Trump is bad for the voters’ daily lives, what steps are needed to change the country for the better, and why the speaker is the person to do it.
W. B. Yeats expressed a hard truth when he said, “Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned.” So, get to work Democrats, start addressing the hearts and minds of the millions who are waiting for a reprieve for the prison of Trumpism. I’m talking to you Michael, Cory, Steve, Amy, Pete, Elizabeth, Joe, and the rest.