Most Overrated
Political Speech: Conservatives often like to refer nostalgically
to "The Speech," a nationally televised address Ronald Reagan
gave in support of Barry Goldwater on the eve of the 1964 presidential
election. They rarely quote it, though, and for good reason. The
Speech, later officially titled "A Time for Choosing," is a frequently
hysterical, frequently hilarious rant. It's not just loaded with
such Reagan trademarks as wildly exaggerated statistics on government
spending and spurious anecdotes about government bureaucrats ("sixty-six
shiploads of grain headed for Austria disappeared without a trace")
and mothers having seven children and getting divorced so they
can get a little more welfare. Nor is it just completely callous
toward anyone below the poverty level ("We were told four years
ago that seventeen million people went to bed hungry each night.
Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet!"). More
important, The Speech revealed complete ignorance about the most
fundamental ways in which American government and society worked.
This included farm price supports (he claimed the Johnson administration
"asked for the right to imprison farmers who wouldn't keep books
as prescribed by the federal government"), youth programs ("were
going to put our young people in camps"), Medicare ("France admitted
that their Medicare program is now bankrupt. They've come to the
end of the road."), the Federal Reserve Board ("our government
[must] give up its program of deliberate planned inflation"),
and foreign aid ("we bought a two-million-dollar yacht for Haile
Selassie. We bought dress suits for Greek undertakers, extra wives
for Kenya government officials. We bought a thousand TV sets for
a place where they have no electricity. In the last six years,
fifty-two nations have bought seven billion dollars worth of our
gold, and all fifty-two are receiving foreign aid from this country").
To top it all off, Reagan appropriated an FDR line, saying, "You
and I have a rendezvous with destiny," and somehow failed to attribute
it.
The
popular wisdom is that The Speech was at least a seminal moment
in the modern conservative movement, the archetype for what would
become Reagan's standard stump speech and the star turn that first
won him wide recognition. Reagan himself would write, with his
usual exuberance: "The speech raised eight million dollars and
soon changed my entire life." In fact, it drew little notice outside
right-wing circles and would be entirely remodeled by the time
its author was running for President. As Reagan thundered, out
of the blue, near the crescendo of The Speech, "Somewhere a perversion
has taken place." Uh-huh.
Most
Underrated Political Speech: William Jennings Bryan is a case
study in what happens when you live too long. Bryan's late-life
shenanigans peddling land in Florida, prosecuting evolution in
Tennessee have led many to write off his earlier political efforts
as mere bluster and buffoonery. Yet, the "Cross of Gold" speech,
delivered in Chicago on July 8, 1896, during the Democratic party's
platform debate, is still a great speech. It is certainly a fighting
speech against the adherents of the gold standard. "We have petitioned,
and our petitions have been scorned; we have entreated, and our
entreaties have been disregarded; we have begged, and they have
mocked when our calamity came. We beg no longer; we entreat no
more; we petition no more. We defy them." But unlike so much current
oratory, it never seeks to smear or mock, but to persuade. Bryan
only punctured his opponents' arguments, and he did so with a
ready erudition that made reference to the careers of Jackson
and Jefferson, Cicero and Napoleon.
The
tragedy of the speech and of Bryan's campaign is that it too often
narrowed the great goals of populism down to a dubious pitch for
bi-metallism. The other specific positions he champions in the
speech, and which we now take for granted, including the governments
exclusive right to print money and the right to impose an income
tax ("When I find a man who is not willing to bear his share of
the burdens of the government which protects him, I find a man
who is unworthy to enjoy the blessings of a government like ours").
Yet Bryan is most eloquent, even poetic in the greater cause he
pleads, the fundamental equality of all Americans before the law,
despite the ascendancy of what was then called "the money power":
"Ah, my friends, we say not one word against those who live upon
the Atlantic coast, but the hardy pioneers who have braved all
the dangers of the wilderness, who have made the desert to blossom
as the rose, the pioneers away out there, who rear their children
near to Nature's heart, where they can mingle their voices with
the voices of the birds, out there where they have erected schoolhouses
for the education of their young, churches where they praise their
Creator, and cemeteries where rest the ashes of their dead. These
people, we say, are as deserving of the consideration of our party
as any people in this country." What's more, he wrote the whole
thing himself.
© Copyright Forbes Inc. 2000
