Acceptance Speeches Part I: The Republicans

Last night was the first Presidential debate…

How did we get here?

Let’s look at the acceptance speeches of the nominees for President and Vice-President of both parties.

First, the Republicans, and Presidential nominee Senator John McCain.
Senator McCain’s speech was in the “classical” mode of the Presidential nominee.

He began with “nods” or acknowledgements to family, titular party heads, in this case, President Bush, even to the opposition.

The main body of his speech centered around the image of “fitness”, derived from his military background, his captivity, his fighting nature, his maverick nature, his ability to form bipartisan cooperation, his basic belief in America’s greatness, and America’s need to “return” to its roots.

These narrative components formed the tree branches on which he hung his conservative philosophy with policy pronouncements, taking his audience by the hand from the base of the tree to the top.

(As an aside, McCain blew me away last night with his use of the word “festoon” in the debate…I have NEVER heard a politician use it, and I salute him for his brave expanding of voters’ vocabulary!)

How about the new entrant on the scene, Republican Vice-Presidential nominee, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin?

Well, her speech also displayed some customary elements, but from a different model.

While Senator McCain certainly attempted to distance himself from Washington to a degree, he did not deny his role in it; this implicit promise of continuity, of fitness through appropriate experience, made his speech classical. He also did not deny the appropriate role of government as an aid to people in trouble, traditionally a 20th century Democratic theme, and, in the tradition of the Founding Fathers, federal.

Sarah Palin’s speech reached back to a Jeffersonian model, the politician as embedded revolutionary, anti-federal government, a theme as old as the Republic, and particularly pleasing to the Republican base of the last generation.

In this tradition, a lack of experience is not only an aid to competence and new ideas, it is an implicit guarantee of virtue.

While Governor Palin also gave “nods” to her senior on the ticket and her family, these “nods” developed into her branches. Her family became her symbol of government, and her heritage in a rural state, far from “elites”, became the gauntlet she threw down at the feet of her critics, both real and imagined.


In fact, while her choice was of concern to many (including her own party), to some degree, her deriding of “elites” was not so much a criticism of those forces, as the setting up of a “straw man” in order to invite her listeners to join her in an alliance of good and common folk.

That alliance, that partnership that she invited her listeners to join not only derided the elite, whoever that might be, it was an evocation of American “exceptionalism”, that localism that the Founders knew would be a check on the potential concentration of power in the federal government.

From this exceptionalism flows the aspirational alliance that Governor Palin formed with her listeners: I am only a Governor, a Mom, most of all a parent, just like all of you, and I can be a great person, the number two person in the federal executive, and so can you! That aspirational possibility of American politics, where American idol meets the Jeffersonian small farmer is the nexus of the Palin appeal, and one pole of the central argument about government’s role that has shaped American politics since the beginning.

The jarring aspect of her speech, was the use of one classical element: the positioning of the Vice-Presidential nominee as “hachet man” (or in this case, woman!) for her party. Deriding Obama’s work as a community organizer was jarring because such criticism could be turned against Palin. Community organizing is the knitting together of local elements and nothing if not aspirational.

The other jarring aspect of her speech was her lauding of McCain’s federal experience while also distancing herself consciously and proudly from his heritage, a balancing act she did not quite bring off.

But, then, this balancing act is the discomfort at the core of the Jeffersonian small government position: we must take over the government to make it smaller and more responsive, even if that act of dismantling in a sense makes the government more intrusive.

I’ll examine the other side of that argument when I review the Democratic acceptance speeches in my next post.

Stay tuned.