There are rare times in a candidate's career when his or her carefully manufactured message begins to exceed the bounds of normal political rhetoric and approach something closer to fundamental truth. Over the past three weeks in Iowa, Sen. John Edwards' (D-N.C.) stump speech did something like that, transforming him from also-ran to contender for the Democratic nomination.
Edwards' rise had only partially to do with his Jan. 10 Des Moines Register endorsement and his deft performance at a Jan. 4 debate. Those two events helped put him on the map in Iowa, but it was a new stump speech introduced just after the new year that tied together his policy proposals, long-standing themes and background into the kind of overarching narrative that can take listeners from A to Z without missing a beat. The speech helped turn previously fine but forgettable Edwards events into conversion sessions that left listeners across Iowa raving, "He's fabulous," as one woman told me in Waterloo.
Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), who won the Iowa caucuses and is now ahead in New Hampshire, also retooled his repertoire, beginning with a speech he gave last November that he and his aides noticed got a much stronger audience response than usual.
Meanwhile, former Gov. Howard Dean (D-Vt.), who had seized the mantle of truth-teller (and front-runner) earlier in the year, stuck with a stump speech that had inspired thousands over the summer. But that speech, heavy as it was on foreign policy and Iraq, increasingly failed to resonate in media-saturated Iowa after the capture of Saddam Hussein. Concurrently, Edwards reworked his message and gave the best performances of his campaign just as the majority of undecided voters were tuning into the race [and as Dean and Rep. Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.) bombarded the airwaves and mailboxes with ads attacking each other]. When voters started to turn away from Dean, Edwards and Kerry were ready.
The planning started, Edwards' aides say, about three weeks before the new year. Edwards had introduced himself to voters last spring with a focus on biography, his now familiar "son of a millworker" story. Summer was devoted to developing policy proposals, and fall to promoting an agenda for governing based on these proposals. The plan was to add a more explicitly political message to the mix right before the voting started, one that would sum up everything that had come before. "He looked at this moment in the way he would pursue a closing argument in one of his legal cases," says Jennifer Palmieri, Edwards' press secretary. After presenting voters with the evidence and character witnesses and attacking the opposition -- in this case, George W. Bush --it was time to wrap up the case. "He spent a lot of time over the holidays thinking about it," says Palmieri. "We wanted to present the policy ideas in a new light."
The patient game plan enabled Edwards to lay out what has become the centerpiece of his new presentation, the "Two Americas" rhetoric. Since last spring, Edwards had been speaking about how America has two educational systems. In the late fall, he decided it was time to extend that description. It isn't just the schools, he told his staff, it's a broader problem. There are two tax systems, two systems of government and, finally, two Americas.
Policy director Robert Gordon, an attorney who came to Edwards' office from the latter's Senate staff after some clerking at the Supreme Court, and speechwriter Wendy Button, a former speechwriter for Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), took the basic concept and wrapped a speech around it -- the "Two Americas" that Edwards delivered on Dec. 29 in Des Moines. Edwards then took the speech and spent the next several days tinkering with it, giving it personal touches and more of a narrative arc. This, he figured, was his last chance to answer any questions or doubts voters might have about him, so he added a section to the end that headed common questions (his age and experience) off at the pass.
He planned to use the new speech right after the new year. "Then on Jan. 3, we were driving to Nashua [N.H.] to give the speech," says Palmieri, "and he took my notebook and wrote down an outline of what he wanted to say," just as he would outline, but not memorize and recite, a closing argument. "And that was the first time he delivered what you now recognize as the stump speech."
The next week, Palmieri took notes as Edwards improvised on the stump, keeping track of what he added and what he left out, what worked and what still needed improvement. "And that's how it evolved," she says. "I think it's the most effective speech of his candidacy."
Iowa voters clearly agreed. At Dee's Place in the hamlet of Parkersburg -- a tiny café with cheap linoleum floors, fake-brick wall paneling, and a handwritten sign advertising $2.50 biscuits and gravy -- I watched the speech convert a group of retired United Auto Workers who had previously been considering Gephardt.
"I'm really impressed by [Edwards]. I like the sincerity," said Jim Sutton, a self-described "farm boy" who wears small glasses that give him a thoughtful air. "I'm a common man myself. I don't have a degree." Ron Hayung, 59, known as "Big Ron," was favorably impressed as well. "I kind of was leaning to Gephardt, but I think [Edwards] has some good ideas that will bring people out," he said. "He reminds me of a young John Kennedy," chimed in Linda Schmitz, 54. Added her husband, Ron Schmitz, "I think he's gonna be the next president, and God I hope so."
For Kerry, meanwhile, the rhetorical shift also started with a stand-alone event: the Iowa Democratic Party's Jefferson-Jackson Dinner on Nov. 15. "Iowa Democrats, it's time to get real," Kerry told them. "George Bush thought he could play dress-up on an aircraft carrier in front of a sign saying 'Mission Accomplished' and we wouldn't notice that our troops are dying in Iraq every day. That Americans on the farm and in our factories are hurting and struggling every day. That George Bush has lost two jobs every minute and run up the deficit a billion dollars every day. But we did notice. We reject the cynicism and radically wrong direction of this administration. And we're here to say that tonight marks the beginning of the end of the Bush presidency."
Written by Andrei Cherney, Kerry's chief speechwriter who performed the same job for former Vice President Al Gore, the speech was so well received that the senator decided to keep using parts of it. He'd had to deliver the remarks without a podium, and previously had been working with his staff to adjust his stump speech. The aggressiveness of the language and shortness of the sentences worked well, so he kept them. Though Kerry's stump speech isn't nearly as masterful a performance as is Edwards'-- largely because Kerry lacks Edwards' raw political talent, rags-to-riches biography and sympathetic Southern bonhomie -- in Iowa it served him extremely well once support for Dean began to decline.
Dean, meanwhile, largely stuck with the same format that had helped him rocket to the top of the polls -- though he added a number of Iowa-specific grace notes to his stump speech. And in many ways he was brought low by his dogged adherence to this original speech. Instead of saying things that were new and fresh, he'd said the same thing so many times that he started contracting the thoughts, turning daring, carefully nuanced stances into incorrect, offensively blunt statements, delivered with no discernable passion or genuine feeling. What Edwards and Kerry have shown in the past month is what Dean previously demonstrated: that a fresh message, or at least a consistent one delivered in a fresh way, can transform a political race very quickly.
Garance Franke-Ruta is a Prospect senior editor.
