By William Safire
The New York Times
September 7, 2008
Samuel Augustus Maverick, Texas rancher of the 1840s, is proudly sitting up in his grave. His name, which has become an eponymous American word, was cited repeatedly at last week’s unexpectedly enthusiastic Republican convention.
“I’ve been called a maverick,” John McCain told his rounded-up party. “Sometimes it’s meant as a compliment; sometimes it’s not.” True enough: old Sam Maverick’s friends said he refused to brand his cattle because it was cruel to animals; competing ranchers said it let him round up and claim all the unbranded cattle in the neighborhood. In an era that has sophisticates displaying designers’ initials, the Americanism maverick now means “one who bears no man’s brand,” or in McCain’s evocation of Thoreau’s metaphor, “marches to the beat of his own drum.”
The Op-Ed page editors yanked this former speechwriter back into harness to assess convention speeches, so here goes:
At the Democrats’ gathering in Denver, the best burst of unremarked writing was the loving introduction of Senator Joe Biden by his son: powerful testimony to the lifelong fidelity of a father after family tragedy. The TV camera’s reaction shot of Michelle Obama wiping authentic tears from her eyes and cheeks was to me the convention’s most moving image.
As opined in this space last week, Barack Obama’s speech the final night brought hosannas from the faithful, but — encumbered by its pretentious stadium setting — did not meet his high rhetorical standard. About the only member of the punditariat who agreed that this season’s emperor of oratory was short on clothes that night was David Broder of The Washington Post, who had the unfair advantage of being objective.
Then came the maverick ticket with its takeover of the change game. Senator Joe Lieberman, avoiding Obama’s error of playing to the multitude of partisans present, looked straight at the camera and spoke effectively to fellow Democrats and independents at home about McCain’s coalition-building work in the Senate. Joe faces heavy punishment for his courage from a vindictive Democratic leader, Senator Harry Reid. Best delivery by a Republican male was by Senator Lindsey Graham, who focused on the wisdom of the “surge” McCain advocated. (Obama was later forced by Fox’s persistent Bill O’Reilly to admit, at long last, that the surge “succeeded.”)
Then the St. Paul convention was hit by Hurricane Sarah and her admirable family. The cliché is that — faced by part of a party long troubled by McCain’s different drumming — the governor of Alaska was able to “energize the base” of social conservatives. The more salient fact is that her skillful speech and joyful demeanor was even more impressive than Obama’s introduction to the Democratic Party four years ago. The establishment-shaking candidate was a happy warrior in the glare of major-league scrutiny. Most of the huge, uncommitted audience at home enjoyed this strong woman’s national audition; the first test of McCain’s gamble paid off.
Though her “lipstick” ad lib got the laugh (and may have offended pit-bull fanciers), she forcefully delivered a Sorensenesque line that crystallized the choice this year’s voters face: “There are those who use change to promote their careers. And then, there are those, like John McCain, who use their careers to promote change.”
The McCain acceptance speech reads better than it was read. The straight talker never has been a smooth orator, but his homely, unprofessional speaking style has a way of underscoring his depth of character. The key word in this campaign is “trust,” and with McCain, what you see is what you get.
One purpose of a speech accepting nomination is to press a candidate’s key strength. That called for McCain to set aside his longtime reluctance to recount publicly his wartime suffering. He was careful not to claim to be owed anything by his country; on the contrary, many viewers learned for the first time of how he was “blessed because I served in the company of heroes,” and was affected for the better by his searing wartime experience, which made him readier to command in the future.
The other purpose was to turn the tables on the early campaign “narrative.” Experience is a useful opening political argument — but it looks backward. “Experience Counts” was Richard Nixon’s static slogan in 1960, but “let’s get the country moving again” — John Kennedy’s winning phrase — looked ahead. That’s the outlook McCain chose to adopt in his speech, which was strong on tomorrow’s education needs.
In willingly taking up the two-edged sword of maverickism; in spelling out his frequent fights against the sclerotic, cozy two-party establishment; in zinging that “big-spending, do-nothing, me-first-country-second Washington crowd”; in choosing an exciting new running mate even as Obama was splashing about in the news media adulation of his smoothly delivered acceptance extravaganza, McCain stiffly stole the clothes of change.
That last paragraph befits a speechwriter’s peroration, not the soberly sage, almost bipartisan analysis I originally intended. Note the incidental pop at “media adulation,” a red flag to the arugula-munching “panjandrums of the opinion media,” in Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s phrase, gleefully waved by Sarah Palin and most other Republican convention speakers. McCain, who reveled in media-darlingism eight years ago, did not participate in such shooting at literate fish in a barrel.
As one whose only claim to coinage fame is in Spiro Agnew’s 1970 nattering nabobs of negativism, I have an attack dog in that fight (though not a maligned pit bull).
But here’s a question: In light of public opinion of most opinion journalists being down around that of Congress, is it smart politics to bash the news media?
Because Agnew, and later Nixon, ultimately were forced to resign, conventional wisdom now holds that their blast at “elitism” backfired; but it probably played a part in Nixon’s 49-state re-election landslide in 1972. By curtailing the “instant analysis” and having elected opposition leaders on TV to answer presidential addresses, the press back then took much of the punch out of the administration attack.
However, by slamming back furiously today, some of those mainstreaming or blogging in the news media just might be helping to make their critics’ point. We can hope that the winners in tomorrow’s alliteration wars will be the pleasant Pollyannas of positivism.
