John Kerry’s acceptance speech, and the campaign battle ahead.

by David Remnick

There’s a case to be made that it hardly matters how eloquent or effective John Kerry was at the Democratic National Convention last week. What matters infinitely more is that George W. Bush is the worst President the country has endured since Richard Nixon, and even mediocrity would be an improvement. Indeed, if one regards the Bush Administration’s sins of governance-its distortion of intelligence in a time of crisis, its grotesque indulgence of the rich at the expense of the rest, its arrogant dissolution of American prestige and influence abroad, its heedless squandering of the world’s resources-as worse than the third-rate burglary and second-rate coverup of thirty years ago, then President Bush is in a league only with the likes of Harding, Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan.

For the most part, however, the speakers at the Democratic National Convention refrained from making that case. In the lingo of the week, "Bush-bashing"-at least, for those speakers featured in the shamefully narrow sliver of prime time on offer from the networks-was forbidden. "Making the sale," selling Kerry to the electorate, was the goal of nearly every pronouncement from the stage. In the rehearsal rooms of Boston’s Fleet Center, Party scriveners "scrubbed" speeches of any rhetoric that risked alienating those voters who remain, thirteen weeks from Election Day, undecided. The bookstores around town were well stocked with bilious volumes like "The Bush-Hater’s Handbook," "The I Hate George W. Bush Reader," "The Lies of George W. Bush," but only hints of such outrage sneaked past the Party apparatchiks.

Kerry and his team had reasons for controlling the tone of the Convention and stifling any shrill indulgences. To condescend to Bush, to affect a collective sneer, would be a gift to the Republicans; and-a lesson learned from Conventions past-it is easier to decry divisiveness when you aren’t displaying it. The event’s language was designed to bolster Kerry and to criticize Bush only by way of invidious comparison. (Not that the comparisons and references were terribly subtle. No one needed an Enigma machine to figure out why Jimmy Carter was recalling his days aboard a nuclear submarine or why Bill Clinton was now cheerfully discussing the fact that he, just like a certain President and Vice-President, had chosen not to serve in Vietnam while a certain Democratic contender had volunteered.) The attempt to establish authenticity is a universal in politics-Yitzhak Rabin had it, Shimon Peres didn’t; Eisenhower had it, Stevenson didn’t-and it has long been a particular burden for Democrats, who, since 1968, have routinely been cast, by their opponents, as the party of white-wine-swilling weaklings.

Kerry’s authenticity, the Democratic strategists have agreed, resides in the valor of his youth. And there was something undeniably effective in the way the Convention was militarized, with all those retired generals and comrades-in-arms on the stage to testify to his bravery under fire. Certainly it cast a harsh light on Bush-not only on the President’s soft berth and spotty attendance in the National Guard but also on his flight-suit swagger, the calls to "bring ’em on." The greatest similarity between the first J.F.K. and the current one lies not in their Ivy privilege or clambake geography but, rather, in the fact that both built a Presidential campaign narrative from acts of Navy heroism. Still, the Convention’s display of martial virtue was a little worrying, too: one wonders if future Democrats, in this age of a volunteer, professional Army, will be able to challenge a conservative Republican without the moral credential of three Purple Hearts, a Silver Star, and a Bronze Star.

It takes little from Kerry’s performance to recall just how closely his speech conformed to the tactics and tropes of other acceptance speeches, Democratic and Republican, of the past several decades. Nearly all of them reach into the same spice rack of metaphor, image, and avowal. There is the affirmation that one’s party is the party of uniters, not dividers; there are the paeans to the vanquished fellow-candidates; there is the moment of calibrated self-deprecation ("I’ll try to hold my charisma in check," Bush, 1988; "I know I won’t always be the most exciting politician," Gore, 2000); there are the bold preferences ("I hate war, I love peace," Bush, 1988); there are the cadenced attempts to draw in the delegates ("Can you imagine?" "Yes!" "Will we let them . . . ?" "No!"); there are the invocations of small boys-full of hope and dreams, haunted by early tragedy, comforted by heroic mothers-who turn out to be none other than the nominee (the man from Hope was exceptionally good at this in 1992, but the ne plus ultra of cornball narcissism was Nixon in 1968); and, finally, there are more rhetorical bridges than in all of Venice, more rhetorical mornings than at a breakfast-all-day coffee shop. To read these speeches is to encounter not only the expectable baloney but a form as unwavering as Hopi wedding rites or the Mourner’s Kaddish. They are not called convention speeches for nothing. These are rituals designed less to broadcast detailed policy than to armor the speaker against the onslaught to come, speeches in which George McGovern waxes muscular about providing the "shield of our strength" to our weaker allies and George W. talks of "learning to protect the natural world around us" and changing "the tone of Washington to one of civility and respect." Still, conventions, like all rituals, reveal more than they seem to.

Last week, Kerry proved right those who said that in the homestretch he can be vigorously direct, even combative. As a performer, he could never match Clinton’s conversational connection or Barack Obama’s uncanny marriage of masterly intimacy and enlivened syntax ("The audacity of hope!"). A spirited version of the traditional big-hall delivery-the half-shouted singsong-is about the best Kerry can do. But the decision to have the other prime-time speakers hold off on the Bush-bashing and testify to his biographical authenticity-his bravery, his compassion, his kindness to household pets-made Kerry’s speech that much more forceful. The cautious scrubbing, it emerged, was all in the service of the one speaker who really mattered.

"I will restore trust and credibility to the White House," Kerry said. "I will be a Commander-in-Chief who will never mislead us into war. I will have a Vice-President who will not conduct secret meetings with polluters to rewrite our environmental laws. . . . I want an America that relies on its ingenuity and innovation-not the Saudi royal family." Not that he was mentioning any names, mind you. After deploying these depth charges throughout the speech, Kerry kept a straight face as he delivered the time-honored request that his opponent engage in a high-minded campaign of "big ideas, not small-minded attacks."

In fact, the speech was a signal that the coming election will itself be a kind of war from which neither side is likely to flinch. Soon a new book will head for the shelves, there to do battle with "The Bush-Hater’s Handbook." It is called "Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry." The publisher is Regnery, which had a best-seller not long ago with a volume alleging that the Clintons hung prophylactics from the branches of the White House Christmas tree.

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