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SAY IT TO MY FACE  
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Rick Perlstein
August 26, 2024
The American Prospect
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_ How Democrats learned to tell the plain truth and like it _

"Kamala Harris & Tim Walz - 53915738289", by Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA
2.0)

 

A quiet revolution has been unfolding in how Democrats campaign, and
it helps explain why being a Democrat has suddenly felt so joyous
these past five weeks—and maybe why the Harris-Walz ticket is
pulling ahead of the opposition.

Democrats are suddenly allowed to _say what they mean_.

No trimming. No “triangulation.” No rhetorical bank shots, no
apologies. Really, we haven’t seen anything quite like it since the
surprise landslide of Ronald Reagan in 1980 shocked the party of
“Give ’em hell” Harry Truman into its modern-day defensive
crouch.

You probably know the story of how Truman got the nickname. His
political calling card was a Tim Walz–like, down-home Midwestern
plainspokenness. He was tearing into the opposition with a fierceness
when a delighted audience member cried lustily, “Give ’em hell,
Harry!” He shot back, devil-may-care: “I don’t have to give
’em hell. I just tell the truth and they _call _it hell.”

And that’s what Democratic presidential candidates never seemed to
do again after that Reagan trauma: simply _tell their truth_.

It wasn’t that they lied_, _precisely; outright untruth remained
the province of the party of Nixon, Reagan, George W. Bush, and Trump.
But they were never quite truth-tellers, either. Campaigning as a
Democrat, at the highest level of the game—especially at the
presidential-nominee level of the game—has come to mean never
directly and precisely saying what you believed.

If, that is, you even remembered what you believed, after the
consultants got through with you.

INDIRECTION BECAME DEMOCRATS’ BRAND. You saw it in Michael
Dukakis’s appeal to the electorate in 1988. As a point of pride, he
adamantly refused to name what Democrats were fighting against.
Conservatism’s crass worship of money and explicit contempt for the
notion of disinterested public service made Reagan’s administration
the most corrupt in U.S. history. Figures like Attorney General Ed
Meese, HUD Secretary Samuel Pierce, and EPA Administrator Anne Burford
were either guilty of or stood credibly accused of outright looting of
the public purse. The scar of inequality grew deeper and deeper each
year of his presidency, and creepy theocrats increasingly called the
tune at the base of the party.

But “this election,” Dukakis simpered in his DNC acceptance
speech, “is not about ideology. It’s about competence.” In a
fleeting reference to the Iran-Contra scandal, which proved that
Republicans were ready, willing, and able to leapfrog the Constitution
whenever it fit their ideological needs, Dukakis said, “It’s not
about overthrowing governments in Central America—it’s about
creating jobs in Middle America.”

Rhetoric like that only served to confirm what Republicans often said:
Democrats’ existing _system of beliefs_—the definition of
“ideology”—must be pretty damned weird, if they’re running
away from it so hard.

_MORE FROM RICK PERLSTEIN_
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In 1992, Bill Clinton made his own unique contribution to his
party’s newfound tradition of not giving the opposition hell. It was
called “triangulation.” What that meant—explicitly—was that
the party’s nominee found the rest of his party distasteful. He
surely wasn’t like those callous Republicans, but he also wasn’t
like all those other icky Democrats in Congress either. That was the
reason you should vote for him. Any wonder that, two years later,
voters turned so many of those icky congressional Democrats out of
office in favor of Newt Gingrich’s Republican revolutionaries? At
least, after all, those guys seemed proud of what they were selling.

Then there was Al Gore. If there’s one thing any random person on
the street can tell you about Clinton’s vice president, it’s that
his greatest passion, _the truest thing he knows_, is that
human-caused climate change is the worst problem the world has ever
faced. Indeed, he believed that in 2000, when he ran for president. He
just never talked about it on the campaign trail. The reason,
probably, was that the wizards running party strategy crunched the
numbers, ran the focus groups, and decided that was not what the
public wanted to hear. Useful enough to know, as far as that goes. But
what did that mean for how the candidate appeared to the electorate?

Well, it’s hard work saying something other than what you believe in
your heart. It makes a speaker sweat. You see the gears turning—and
maybe grinding—inside their head. And it’s unpleasant to avoid
talking about what you really want to talk about. It makes a person
look and sound squirrelly. It conveys an inherent untrustworthiness.

Which, no wonder, has been the dominant image of Democratic
presidential candidates for most of our lifetimes.

STEPHEN COLBERT, UNFORGETTABLY, labeled Republicans’ habit of
uttering things that feel emotionally true, even though they are made
up, as “truthiness.” The Democrats had their own, photo-negative
version of truthiness: utterances that are meticulously factual, but
that convey an unmistakable emotional falsiness.

John Kerry was the worst of them all. His entire candidacy was built
upon a foundation of inauthenticity. The party sachems thought they
were geniuses for boosting a Vietnam veteran to run against an
incumbent president who avoided fighting in Vietnam. This was wartime,
and the electorate was supposed to believe a warrior could fight wars
better.

Except, oops, framing Kerry as a warrior occluded the fact that he had
also been, once upon a time, America’s most
celebrated _anti-_warrior.

One of the most heartbreaking research tasks I’ve ever carried out
was tracking down video of Kerry’s early 1970s television interviews
as spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War. They were
magnificent. He would explain, with aching sincerity and searing
clarity, the futility of fighting a war of occupation amid another
country’s civil war, what that does morally to those who fight it,
and why wars like that are almost always all but impossible to win.

Like the time he told Dick Cavett: “Quite frankly, when I was in
Vietnam … I just could never feel that I was there fighting to save
that country, to make it safe for democracy. The only feeling you
could have was that you were _like _the Germans—that you were
there occupying another country. And really this feeling
of _imperialism _is one that actually does pervade much of the world
now when they look at the United States of America.” Then he showed
a film he made of one of his Swift Boat crew’s operations, lingering
upon a peasant farmer dead on the ground: “This is the enemy, so to
speak, in South Vietnam.”

He certainly couldn’t say anything like that in 2004, as Iraq became
an outright fiasco: After all, he had enthusiastically voted to
authorize that war. Which meant he couldn’t criticize the war as
flawed in its very conception_, _only in its execution. Worse, Kerry
had to force himself to pretend he had never known that to be true.

John Kerry joined Meet the Press
[[link removed]] on April 18, 1971 to
discuss his opposition to the Vietnam War. Kerry was a member of the
“Vietnam Veterans Against the War” movement and testified before
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971. Screen grab.

John Kerry, as spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War, appears
on the Dick Cavett Show in July 1971.

Kerry also said in the VVAW days, “Clearly, as you fight with the
Vietnamese, you become aware that this is a war of the people,” and
that it’s “impossible to wage guerrilla warfare without the
support of the people to hide and harbor and supply you”—and that
was, obviously, why America was losing in Vietnam.

And this was exactly what was happening in Iraq by the time he won the
nomination. Kerry just couldn’t _say _it; he could only imply
it—indirectly, with circumlocution.

The one guy who could tell the truth about Iraq was Howard Dean, but
Democratic elites had done all they could to push him out of the race.
Because it was “wartime,” and America would supposedly not abide
an anti-war nominee in wartime.

Kerry clinched; Democrats clenched. That is the only way I can
describe what it felt like listening to the nominee on the subject of
Iraq: cringe after cringe. I can’t imagine what it must have been
like inside his head, threading those needles, censoring what he knew
to be true, squaring the circle of scourging a failed war without
implicating his own support of it before venturing any utterance on
the subject, grinding his gears lest he accidentally let slip those
darker truths his deepest experience had taught him. No one is a good
enough actor to convincingly pull that off for long.

And it showed.

In March of 2004, a CBS/_New York Times _poll found only a third of
Americans thought Kerry “says what he believes.” And that
was _before _Team Bush began beating him up as a “flip-flopper.”
No wonder he sounded that way: He had imposed upon himself a sort of
lobotomy on the very subject that had once been most deeply inscribed
upon his very heart.

I recently asked a friend what she remembered about John Kerry back
then. She replied, “I never listened to what he had to say because
it just sounded like he was saying what he was supposed to say, not
what he believed. There was no there there.”

Kerry even enforced a version of his own self-censorship on the rest
of the party: At the 2004 convention, criticizing George W. Bush by
name was _banned_.

FOR DECADES, IT HAS FELT LIKE EVERY leading Democrat was performing
some version of that—because all of them, to greater or lesser
degrees, bought that the success of Reaganism, and the supposed
failings of liberalism, proved what Republicans said it did: that
“Middle America” inherently agreed with _them_, and thought of us
all as a bunch of unpatriotic, extremist … weirdos.

But now: farewell to all that. Now, we can tell them the truth, and
let them call it hell.

You saw that all last week in Chicago, from likely and unlikely
sources. Oprah Winfrey: “Let us choose common sense over
nonsense.” Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland, on enlisting in the Army at
17: “I had to ask my mom to sign the paperwork for me, because I
don’t have bone spurs.” Rep. Jamie Raskin, also of Maryland: Trump
is a “career criminal … and his pet chameleon J.D. Vance.” Coach
Walz: “Health care and housing are human rights.” Because, simply
this: “Freedom!”

Pete Buttigieg especially impressed me for the way he came, _hard_,
at a foundational source of Democrats’ past inauthenticity. It is
the learned helplessness that holds that certain Middle American
prejudices are ineluctable and unmovable, to be accommodated, not
challenged. The most frustrating victim of that learned helplessness
was President Barack Obama. Buttigieg had the guts to take that on
directly.

Obama is never more excruciating than when he pronounces one certain
word with a little scowl, as if he had just bit down on something
gross. That word is _politics_. In Barack’s lexicon, it’s the
opposite of “doing what’s right,” an antonym for “character”
itself. And if you think I’m exaggerating, listen to what Obama said
at the convention in describing Biden’s successes beating back the
COVID epidemic: “At a time when millions of our fellow citizens were
sick and dying, we needed a leader with the character to
put _politics_ aside and do what was right.”

Secretary Buttigieg handled that mistaken notion at the United Center,
like Michael Jordan swatting away an opponent’s shot in the same
arena in 1993.

He was talking about what transformed “the existence of [his]
family”—him, his husband, and their two adopted children—from
“literally impossible as recently as 25 years ago” to a simple
fact performed every morning at their kitchen table. He pointed out
how it “didn’t just happen. It was brought about. Through idealism
and courage. Through organizing and persuasion. And storytelling, and,
yes, through _politics_.”

I think he was deliberately tweaking Obama. Hearing him do it, I
thought of a story from 2007, when the Obama campaign recruited a
popular gospel singer to perform as part of his campaign entourage.
His name was Donnie McClurkin. I’ve written about him in a previous
column
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describing his performance as the warm-up act for George W. Bush at
the 2004 Republican convention as a dog whistle to Christian
evangelical homophobic bigots. A prominent “ex-gay,” McClurkin had
recently appeared on _The 700 Club _braying that homosexuals were
“trying to kill our children.”

Obama, I’m sure, could not have agreed with this less. And, in that
particular instance, Obama was saved from himself: The hue and cry
raised by his gay supporters forced McClurkin’s cancellation from
the campaign tour. But that he thought this was a good idea in the
first place spoke deeply to Democrats’ infinite resourcefulness, in
the bad old days, in thinking they somehow help themselves by not
saying what they actually believe.

Obama somehow thought he could accomplish something to better the
nation by signaling that he was somehow on the same side as this
monstrous person—that meeting the bad guys halfway would somehow
convince them to denude their badness.

Instead of just telling the truth, and letting them call it hell.

YOU KNOW WHO ELSE TWEAKED Barack Obama a little bit about that?
Michelle Obama. In a suit that suggested a warrior’s suit of armor,
with a speech borne aloft by the same spirit of truth-telling
combativeness sweeping the rest of the party—and which her husband
himself leaned into a little bit with his now-infamous joke about the
size of Donald Trump’s penis—she launched into a peroration about
how “we cannot be our own worst enemies,” and that the minute a
lie takes hold, we cannot start wringing our hands. “We cannot get a
Goldilocks complex about whether everything is just right!”

Exactly!

Which brings us to Kamala Harris’s speech. No need to rehearse the
best lines; history will do that for us. That’s largely because the
soul of the thing was not its specific sentences. It was in her
affect. That sense you had that there were no gears grinding away
inside her head, nor negotiations with herself. That feeling that she
was telling the truth as she saw it, devil take the hindmost. That it
seemed to emerge not from her teleprompter, but from her being,
singing a song in the key of her life.

Maybe because the consultants didn’t have time to assemble their
focus groups, she was left alone to tell her truth.

But look at what happened next: They’re calling it hell. Keep that
up, Kamala Harris. Keep it up.

_It’s Project 2025 Summer here at The Infernal Triangle! I’m
studying the whole thing [[link removed]] for a
series of columns. If you want to share your expertise on one of the
federal departments the Heritage Foundation wants to weaponize or gut,
contact me at [email protected]
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_RICK PERLSTEIN is the author of a four-volume series on the history
of America’s political and cultural divisions, and the rise of
conservatism, from the 1950s to the election of Ronald Reagan. He
lives in Chicago._

_Used with the permission © The American Prospect, Prospect.org
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_Read the original article
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* Democratic Party
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* Kamala Harris
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* Harry Truman
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* Michael Dukakis
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* Bill Clinton
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* John Kerry
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* Ronald Reagan
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* Barack Obama
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