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
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 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, 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 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].
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.
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