Harvard Talk: "It wasn't about the speeches."

Report on three conversations:  Donna Brazile, E. J. Dionne, Robby Mook

What really motivates voters? 

I am attending events at Harvard and trying to make it count.   Back in 1967 to 1971 I was scrambling to earn enough money to stay in school; I was worried about being drafted into the war in Vietnam; I was attending classes and figuring out how to write papers; I read books, lots and lots of books.   I was good at that, but not so good at getting out of the safety zone of the library.   I would have considered it a waste of precious time to attend political events, other than the time George Wallace came to Boston Common. I was part of that crowd, scoffing at him.

Bostonians weren't racist, I thought.

Donna Brazile

It is impossible to re-live my youth, but it isn't impossible to try to make up for lost time.  People I see in the news are holding events and making speeches and attending receptions, so I was there to meet them.  Donna Brazile is the intermittent head of the DCC, and was the former chair of the Al Gore campaign, and is a reliable voice on TV.  E.J. Dionne is a journalist and now a Visiting Fellow at the JFK school, and he speaks more as a journalist than a Democratic partisan.  Robby Mook was Hillary Clinton's campaign manager.  

I got to talk with each of them.

Donna Brazile was at a reception.  A man who was doing the important work of keeping her moving through the attendees abandoned his post to get her a glass of red wine.   I told her I enjoyed her thoughtful comments on TV and asked her who was lining up to be the Democratic nominee.  She said some forty people were on the bench, all plausible in one way or the other.  The one who will emerge, she said, will depend on which issues seem most important in 2019 and 2020, and that is too soon to know.  I said that in less than 2 years people will be holding rallies in New Hampshire.  Yes, she said, the cycle was moving fast.

Then I shared an idea that this blog has explored.  I said I watched five different events by Hillary live, and another five by Trump live, and that I thought that body language and presence were a huge part of the political decision by voters.  Trump looked confident and powerful and dominant, and people wanted that, I said.   She said she agreed.  In 2016, that was a big deal.  It might not be in 2020.   She was handed the glass of red wine.  Her handler said there were some undergraduates he wanted her to meet.   He was doing his job.

E. J. Dionne is tiny.  On TV, sitting at a desk and saying intelligent things fluently he seems tall.  In real life he is maybe 5' 3".   He had time to visit, less pressured by others.  I shared the idea that the Trump-Hillary matchup was analogous to a professional wrestling contest, with Hillary playing an archetype--the good girl--and Trump playing the archetype of the "bad boy rule breaker who is on our side."   I said that the issues were subsumed into this basic choice, and people chose the big tough guy.   He was skeptical.  He said he agreed the voters made gut choices but said he had never thought about a professional wrestling metaphor.  

E. J. Dionne

I tried again.  Imagine, I said, a high school election for student body president.  The swing voters are people who know almost nothing about the two candidates.  One is the valedictorian, a good girl who is really tight with the school principal, and someone who is experienced having gone through all the lower offices.   The other candidate is the cool guy who had the confidence to date a pretty cheerleader, then dump her for another and younger prettier cheerleader, and then dump her for yet another cheerleader.  He had a cool car, he acted like the principal didn't impress him, and he was quarterback of the football team.   And imagine that the school principal isn't all that popular with the students.   Who wins the election?   OK, he said, he got it.    But he noted that Hillary did get three million more votes.  Yes, I agreed, but not in those Big Ten states where she needed them, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin.

It was a good talk.   If I see him on TV talking about candidates as archetypes or professional wrestling then I will know I got through to him.

Later that day I visited with Robby Mook, campaign manager for Hillary.   I qualified myself as a friend, noting that my wife and I had maxed out in donations to Hillary.  "But why didn't someone write her a speech that really soared with emotion and heart, something that made an overarching story that explained the world and what she wanted to do?"

He said that she had that speech and delivered it really well.  "Didn't you agree that her convention speech did that?"  I said my observation was that her speeches listed policy and they didn't pull at my heart.  "What about her Reno, Nevada speech?   It was very well received."  I said I didn't remember it.  

"Trump's speeches were nothing special," he said.   I said that I had created a couple of transcripts of parts of Trump speeches,  and the transcripts were nearly unintelligible-- but that delivered extemporaneously they made sense to his audience.   "Trump moved audiences and filled them with enthusiasm and Hillary's didn't," I said, adding that this is what I thought she needed.  "Emotion and heart."

Robby Mook

Robb Mook said that we should agree to disagree, then added, "The 2016 campaign wasn't about the speeches, anyway."  Then he got pulled away from me to a reporter from a local TV station who kept trying to get him on record on tape regarding something about the DNC and Bernie Sanders.  Mook clearly didn't want to cooperate, shaking his head and telling him to "talk with the press office."  The TV reporter persevered, so Mook stripped away decisively into the hands of some other visitors.

"It wasn't about the speeches."

I reflected on that statement.   Since Hillary's campaign manager wasn't distressed by what I considered a serious weakness in her campaign it was clear that Mook was either in a defense-mode, or in fact he agreed that her speeches were just fine.   My very first post about the campaign in this blog, going back to August, 2015, addressed the lack of apparent emotion in her speeches, and that point of view never changed: Hillary's speeches were policy and prose.  Not poetry and music.  She needed a little of the black southern preacher, or even a little of her husband Bill, enriching her speeches--at least to my mind. She wasn't saving any souls.  It was head, not heart.

But Mook actually echoed the very idea that I was presenting to Brazile and Dionne: it wasn't really about the speeches, after all.   It was the body language.  It was the circumstance.  It was the typecasting and Hillary fell into a trap.  She thought she had the better role:  the experienced one.  Trump presented as the big, confident, swaggering guy who was independent of the status quo power structure, and people wanted change.  He was big change   Hillary was typecast into a role as someone who understood the power structure and was part of it, and people wanted change.

There it is.  People didn't want the good girl status quo.  They wanted the bad boy who would shake things up.