How Obama can be the un-Kerry in Denver

Three veteran Democrats game out the Democratic and Republican conventions. Beware of PUMAs!

Editor's note: Listen to a podcast of this round table here.

By Thomas Schaller

Read more: Republican Party, George W. Bush, Democratic Party, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Hillary Rodham Clinton, John McCain, Politics, News, John Kerry, Barack Obama, 2008 election, Thomas F. Schaller

Aug. 22, 2008 |

It is a common lament that the Democratic and Republican conventions have become mere pageants, empty of content. But as Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com has shown, after crunching the numbers, the candidate who gets the biggest bounce in the polls from these pageants generally wins in November. On the eve of the Democratic National Convention, and of Barack Obama's announcement of his running mate, Salon asked three noted panelists what makes for a successful convention, how Democrats can avoid the pitfalls of John Kerry's convention, and what to do about those pesky Hillary Clinton supporters.

Michael Cohen is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and author of a new book on presidential campaign speeches titled "Live From the Campaign Trail." Previously, he was the chief speechwriter for U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Bill Richardson and Sen. Chris Dodd.

Elaine Kamarck was one of the founders of the New Democrat movement that helped elect Bill Clinton president, and served in the Clinton White House from 1993 to 1997. She was a senior policy advisor for Al Gore's presidential campaign in 2000, and has been a public policy lecturer at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government since 1997.

Chris Lehane served as Vice President Al Gore's press secretary both during the Clinton administration and during the 2000 presidential campaign, and is co-principal at Fabiani & Lehane, a California-based strategic communications firm.

Salon spoke to Cohen, Kamarck and Lehane by phone.

Thomas Schaller: We have a press expert and a policy expert and a speech-making expert taking part in this conversation. Let me start with the press expert. Chris, from your perspective, what does a press secretary's dream convention look like in terms of either good things that do happen or bad things that don't happen? Chris Lehane: No. 1 is really having a disciplined program in place designed to drive your message. No. 2, to me, is always, what is going to be that one, indelible message visual that breaks through? In 2000, and this wasn't planned or programmed, but it ended up being perfect for us, it was Al Gore kissing Tipper Gore. And we used to joke that that was a 20-point kiss at the convention. And then the third thing I think is making sure that you do not end up with any problems that overtake your convention or that undermine your message, whether it's dissidence on the floor or someone giving a speech and saying something they should not have said, whether it's something coming up in terms of some scandal involving someone on the ticket or someone of a high level in the party. Schaller: Elaine, Chris talks about the importance of getting your themes across. The media wants to talk about gossip and candidates and the speeches themselves and maybe not so much actual policy. How can candidates get core policy themes across in these four days amid the pageantry? Elaine Kamarck: I always think of policy in political campaigns as the reality check, which makes the rhetoric and the good messaging real. And I think the importance of policy is really to bolster and make credible the kind of themes that I think Chris was talking about in terms of what you want to do at your convention. In other words, if you are simply up there saying repeatedly, "Universal healthcare," but you've never had a plan, you can say it until you're blue in the face, and you can have every Madison Avenue genius in the world making ads about it but if there's never been a plan put out there that people who know something about the issue say is somewhat credible, then your messaging is going to be undercut because you have an advertisement without a product. Schaller: Michael, you've just written a book about presidential campaign speeches and have drilled down on a lot of these convention speeches. So I know you have a lot to say about it, but give us the formula for what makes a good and, I suppose, what makes for a bad convention speech. Michael Cohen: I don't think it's necessarily a cut-and-dried issue. It depends a lot on context and also how the convention has gone. You know, it's funny, I was thinking about how Ronald Reagan's '80 convention speech was a great speech, but actually, there was also a great convention, where basically all four days played up the notion that Reagan was a different kind of conservative, Republicans were the party of change. And I'd compare that to 1988, which before George Bush gave his convention speech was kind of a disastrous convention. I remember the Tuesday was the day they introduced Dan Quayle as the V.P. pick and it was pretty much downhill from there. What Bush did in that speech was sort of reintroduce himself to the country. He was really able to cast himself in a much more positive light than he had been seen in for the previous eight years. And at the same time, I think he set the contrast between the two candidates for the election. And I think that's what any good speech really does -- it lays out, pretty much, what kind of individual you are, what kind of vision you have for the presidency, what your vision of your candidacy is, but at the same time creates a pretty strong contrast between you and your opponent. Schaller: Four years ago, John Kerry decided that there wasn't going to be a lot of negativity in Boston at the Democratic convention. People criticize that all the time. All the speeches were scrubbed of any criticisms of Bush and Cheney, and I'm wondering, we've talked a lot about the affirmative, positive message -- how does a candidate use the convention to go negative and do it well and what are the risks of doing that? Cohen: I think it's smartest not to do it yourself. I think one of the things that was so effective about Bush's campaign in '04 and also the convention, was that the harshest rhetoric came from [others] and that set up the negative attack on Kerry. But I think Bush, though he obviously had sort of a negative element to his speech, had a much more affirmative message, a much more clear message of what kind of president, what kind of administration we'd have the next four years than John Kerry did. Kerry was smart to stay on a positive message but also needed to contrast that with some negative attacks on the president. Lehane: I think it somewhat depends on what your campaign's strategic theory is for the particular race that you're in. In 2004, Kerry was running against a president who'd already served four years. And historically, in such races, those campaigns inherently become a referendum on the four years of the president. The Bush folks recognized from Day One that if that was indeed what people were going to end up voting on in the fall, that they would lose. So their entire convention consisted of an overarching strategy that was to make the 2004 election not a referendum on Bush's four years, but a referendum on Kerry and his character. In my opinion, they did it very effectively. I think on Kerry's side, while they had a good convention, I think in terms of the tactical things they did, the disciplined nature of it, it ended up being a little bit of a cotton candy convention, where there really wasn't a lot there at the end of the day that left voters with a real sense of what direction they were going to take the country. And in particular, did not make it a referendum on the Bush years, which should have been the strategic imperative of that campaign.

I think in 2008 Obama has a little bit of a different challenge than Kerry faced in 2004, although clearly the McCain campaign recognizes that they are going to make this a referendum on Obama. But for Obama, he's a little bit like some of the vice-presidential candidates we've had in the past -- famous, but not necessarily well-known. With all the macro trends in this race favoring him and potentially manifesting themselves in a decent-size win, I think he needs to make people comfortable in who he is as the next president and the next commander in chief, and so to me a huge part of this is him ultimately giving folks a real vision of where he's going to take the country and who he is as a person and his leadership style.

Next page: "I took my instructions from the Kerry people to not attack Bush, and it just didn't feel right, OK?"