A Carter Speechwriter Offers Advice to Barack Obama

MEMORANDUM FOR THE SENATOR
SUBJECT: ACCEPTANCE SPEECH
FROM: GORDON STEWART

If it is presumptuous to tell anyone what to say at any time, how would you describe doing just that to the the world's most acclaimed political speaker days before the crucial address of his career? Still, after some expletives, please read on. Once you've won the election, only your closest family will ever speak to you like this again. Right now, your success in Denver and November means too much to hundreds of millions for the deference your abilities and accomplishments deserve.

Experience forms us, and my urgency comes largely from our failure as speechwriters for President Jimmy Carter to forge emotional and cognitive connections between his great values and good policies. I don't feel alone in thinking that for all your intelligence, passion, and fluency, you have not achieved this either. If you had, you might be running ahead, even allowing for the historic variables we know grade your road more steeply than that of a white southerner.

As you know (and I'll bet President Carter has mentioned to you), apt analogies exist between the primary campaigns of 1976 and 2008—boldness, determination, organization, entitled opponents, success. You're also both well aware that in spite of a spent incumbency, public restiveness, and a mediocre opponent, Jimmy Carter barely held on to win.

For all the positive similarities, including the fact that you are both extraordinary men who offer intimidating examples of self-discipline to accomplish so much on behalf of so many, there seem to be shared disconnections between high ideals (Hope-Change-Together in your case) and the Obama policies drilling endlessly down your websites—just as position papers on everything rose skyward from our Carter desks but never quite seemed to touch his ideals of Honesty, Fairness, Rightness. Your critics are unfair when they complain that you don't have details. Your fine staff and advisers have created a forest of specifics. But too little unifies them except those laudable values whose force has weakened through repetition and, in today's media, satire.

Carter's 1976 acceptance speech was pretty good, but you face the expectations you created with your keynote hit last time, a far less forgiving media, and a vastly meaner opposition machine. Your speech has to do more than uplift us as a people—you'll do that the moment you reach the prow of the biggest, brightest ship you've ever sailed on and just stand there. Your words have to define the stakes and choice of this election, indelibly, for six weeks, and most importantly, for every individual voter.

Please note "individual" voter. We may wish Americans to feel more connected to each other. Your candidacy itself has fostered this. But we still go into the voting booth alone. OK, sometimes they let me take in my 9-year-old daughter. But in that booth, when the curtain is closed, she and my family will be foremost when I choose whom I think best for our future.

"One Nation" is a great theme for the Democratic Party. It will be even greater if you can make it America's song as our president. I just don't know any people with real lives who believe that their heaviest burdens will be lifted next year if only we Americans start acting more like "One Nation." It may be Lincoln-like, but it's static. It doesn't move us forward, which is what we want someone to do. It echoes old Democratic Party rhetoric from all those conventions I used to love attending (before those exclusive skybox levels turned the Floor into the farthest bleachers) as a joyous prelude to getting slaughtered in November.

Sadly, you and I know that lots of Americans not only don't care about the dream of One Nation, they actively, if secretly, dislike it. You have walked the same South Side streets where I grew up. 62nd and Dorchester. Building torn down for "urban renewal." Saul Alinsky shaping politics as Paul Sills was making Second City. First political job age 10 as a poll watcher in the anti-Daley Fifth Ward. I didn't see many ordinary folks coming in to vote for "One Chicago." My concern was simply that they be only one voter. I wish more was different today than I'm afraid it is. I believe you will change that—if you can make a speech effective enough to get elected.

Sure a great speech would be, well, great. Listening as a former pro, little is more satisfying than a great speech, whoever makes it. Lord knows the world of political literature could use some upgrading in the form of words at least mostly written by the leader delivering them. But one of my fears is that you will produce a speech everyone will praise but not enough will follow. To avoid this, I'm going to presume to ask you to accept four irritating lessons I've learned the hard way, sometimes at others' expense. Then I'm going to tell you the central idea I hope you will make yours and ours.

1. WHAT GOT YOU HERE WILL NOT GET YOU THERE
It's almost impossible for a self-made success to believe that the next level you seek is not a bigger version of the one you've achieved. It's a different one. Don't even think of scrapping "Change You Can Believe In." It's great, a little wicked, worked well, and dropping it would signal indecision if not panic. Keep it on your podiums, but as a foundation for what will come next. Move forward, please, keep you and we moving forward.

2. YOU CANNOT ARGUE WITH A RESPONSE
It was scary when you lectured grumpy liberals after you tried some moving to the middle. Not because you moved (for a variety of reasons worth several essays, widely electable Democrats always have to), but because you blamed them for not paying close enough attention to your speeches or reading your writings carefully. Aside from being arrogant, it made me worry that if some people are not responding well, you're going to start blaming them for being dull and ignorant. You've come pretty close to this a few times. The great acting guru Lee Strasberg once told an angry young playwright in my directing class that when no one laughed where he thought we should, blaming the audience was not going to make it apologize for its ignorance and insensitivity and start roaring.

3. ANGER IS HOW WE EXORCISE FEAR
You are on to this one already. In fact, you got in trouble being a little too open about it. The more subtle art of politics you are acquiring is to convert fear-based anger into a force. How is this done? This is the part that doesn't work by speaking of togetherness but by lashing what your opponent stands for to what voters fear most, and turning the resulting anger upon those beliefs and their proponent. The result is not pretty, but it prevails. Tying McCain to Bush is useful but insufficient because Bush is rapidly becoming the past, thus no longer to be feared even if loathed, and therefore not the most effective target for popular anger. That must be your opponent himself, because:

4. MY VOTE FOR PRESIDENT IS LESS A REFERENDUM ON THE PAST THAN A BET ON MY FUTURE

Not that negativity doesn't work. We all (especially they) know that it does. But it has to be focused primarily on the guy who can ruin our lives tomorrow, not obsessively on the one who screwed up our recent past. Voters are not judges at the Hague. They're more worried about future pain than past wrongs. A certain amount of rage is vital to the faithful. Too much will convince general voters you are stuck in the past while they are stuck with today and tomorrow.

All of the above explains why I suggest (humbly, respectfully, etc.) that the running and recurring theme of the speech be the clear distinction between what you will do to take us Forward, both as people and as a people, versus all McCain & Co will do to drag us Backward. Every one of his directions and specifics can be accurately characterized as taking us Backward, just as all you stand for moves us Forward.

Yes, this is simple. So is texting. In six short weeks there may not be time to convey more than one basic idea. It needs to be one that carries emotional and cognitive charge.

All McCain and his party offer are trips backward to no jobs, bad jobs, poor old age, no healthcare, bleak times for young people and women, a reversal of what we aspire to as individuals and what we have achieved as a nation.

All John McCain and his bunch want to offer my 9-year-old daughter adopted from Guatemala (sorry, this is me speaking now) is maybe some job working without healthcare for minimum wages they would fight to lower, facing old age without Social Security, cleaning one of his wife's countless condominiums. If that's their idea of a future, it was overcome even before John McCain was born. It's not my dream. It's not yours. And it will not be my child's.

McCain's dangerous fantasies of "victory" abroad come from black-and-white or badly colorized old movies. This, Mr. McCain is the twenty-FIRST century. The idea of a world occupied by American troops is delusional and harmful to every hope each of us has for our children's future.

Senator, you will need to link more directly the tragic folly of Iraq to the fears and constraints we face at home. The hated draft did that for us the last time around. Democrats have tended to view the war as an inherent stupidity in and of itself, which it is, but as the war recedes because of domestic concerns and falling casualties our railing about it sounds defeatist and a bit Martian. Why and how will my life be better when we stop trying to occupy the world?

This moment in history is not about whether you and I and America go left or right but whether we go Forward or Backward. It may not be easy, but it's that simple. You, each of you, know who looks eagerly to the future and who longs to relive the past—and take you with them.

I don't have to write a draft. You are the most accomplished political speaker of our time. You have terrific help. You can make a clear theme, however simple, into a symphony for a nation. Beethoven needed only four notes to create the most memorable theme in music.

Whatever benefit you may derive from this memo, I am confident you will succeed with your speech in Denver and prevail in November. And as the secretary of the Judson Welliver Society of former principal presidential speechwriters (he was the first), I will have the pleasure and relief of helping to induct some of your talented authors into our curious group of writers who have dared to speak to presidents as I have done to you as our candidate.

Gordon Stewart is former deputy chief speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter.