Chicago
OPPORTUNITY, Responsibility, and Community” — this, Leon Panetta told the press three hours before Bill Clinton spoke at the Chicago convention, was “the general context” of the president’s acceptance speech. But, as the world soon discovered, the speech was actually swallowed up in the chaos of policy proposals, sermonettes, and self-addressed valentines that lasted for well over an hour. Something happened to the “general context” on the speech’s journey from concept to execution. What happened to it was Bill Clinton.
Even before the president delivered it, Panetta stressed the passage that “sets the stage for what the rest of the speech does.” I have room to quote it only in part:
“Let us build a bridge to help parents raise their children, to help young people and adults get the education and training they need, to make citizens feel safer, to help [etc.], to break [etc.], to protect [etc.], and to maintain [etc.].”
If it was not the most important passage of the president’s acceptance speech, it was certainly the most representative, for it did, as Panetta said, what the rest of the speech likewise did. It said everything and nothing all at once. In place of a theme, the president offered a metaphor — an amazingly talented bridge that can help, make, break, protect, and maintain, all in a single sentence. The metaphor popped up 22 times, a new metaphor record. While the bridge failed the president as a rhetorical tool, it is a highly useful device for analyzing the speech itself.
The president’s bridge is a very crowded bridge. Before the speech was three minutes old, the president was clubbing his listeners with the amazing number of Americans who are in his debt after his three-and-a-half years of service: 4.4 million Americans buying first homes, 15 million families with new tax cuts, 12 million taking family leave, 10 million students getting college loans. And there were others, fewer in number, whose butts he had kicked: the 1.8 million people who were no longer collecting welfare, the “60,000 felons, fugitives, and stalkers” who can’t get handguns under the Brady bill.
Notwithstanding this mob scene, the president’s bridge can also be a very lonely place, a place of tortured and solitary experience. This is, after all, the empathic president who wakes up every day to go to work for all of us. When he began to build his bridge, four years ago, his mother was with him; now, he reminded us, apropos of nothing at all, she is dead. The increase in drug use among young people has been difficult, too. “It is very, very painful to me.” As for drugs themselves: “I hate them.” Let the word go forth: No drugs on the bridge.
The president’s bridge is a very wide bridge — a bridge of many lanes, accommodating dozens of wide-load semi-tractor trailers rolling across it side by side, spilling out government initiatives as they travel along.
The lesson of the bridge has two parts. First, “the government can only do so much”; and second, there are no problems that the government can’t address. The president offered us a 21st-century government that, if not all-powerful, is at least omni-competent. Does your employer give you hell when you want to take time off to drag your kid to the doctor? On the bridge, the federal government will pass a flex-time law. Do you want the Internet in the classroom? A free degree from a community college? Subsidized child care? A victim’s rights constitutional amendment? This is the bridge for you. As the president succinctly put it: “We need new laws.” Many, many new laws.
Finally, the president’s bridge is a very long bridge. It took 66 minutes to cross at the president’s languorous, self-involved speed, and before the end was in sight many people in the hall — and presumably at home — were ready to jump off. Cameras scanning the floor caught an embarrassing number of nodding heads, weighty eyelids, slumped shoulders. Even the president seemed briefly to succumb, as his laundry list of accomplishments and proposals grew longer. But as the arc of the bridge dipped near landfall, the president grew energized, for he was able to present one of his favored tropes: the banal observation dressed up as a grand and courageous moral claim. Soldiers serving in the Special Forces, he said hotly — eyes narrowed, finger stabbing the air — “do not deserve to have swastikas painted on their doors.”
With the convention drawing to a close and the fall campaign poised to begin, this, then, was the state of the president’s message: long and wide, mobbed and lonely, cluttered and confused and in the end banal. No one will blame you if you’re reminded of other bridges — a toll bridge, a bridge to nowhere, or that bridge in Brooklyn that people have been selling successfully for a hundred years.
