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DECEMBER 7, 2021

Meyerson on TAP

Can Career Senators Learn to Speak Presidential?

The strange cases of Bob Dole, Joe Biden, and LBJ

Most of the obituaries of former Republican Senate leader and
presidential candidate Bob Dole, who died on Sunday at 98, noted a
seeming paradox: Though he ran for president three times and won the GOP
nomination in 1996, he never seemed to master how to talk like a
president, or even a presidential candidate. Instead, he spoke in the
argot of the Senate, made even more impenetrable to lay listeners by his
prairie taciturnity.

To some degree, we expect those who seek the presidency, and even more
those who attain it, to elevate our concerns and values when they speak
to us, ideally through the use of pleasing or exciting cadences, even
when they're just running through a laundry list of programs. (Donald
Trump, to be sure, never had programs; he spoke to his supporters
id-to-id.) Somehow, a serious Senate career seems inimical to that goal.
The two most eloquent presidents of the past 60 years-John F. Kennedy
and Barack Obama-were in the Senate but never of it, just passing
through while warming up to play on a larger stage.

Bob Dole, by contrast, was a senator to his bones, and never had the
capacity, or desire, to break out of Senate-ese. As the Republican
presidential nominee in 1996, he drove his speechwriters to affectionate
despair as he ignored their presidential-appropriate texts to speak
instead in his Upper House shorthand. I recall one Dole rally I covered
for the

**LA Weekly**, where he bemoaned the supposed overreach of Bill
Clinton's administration and called on his fellow Americans to
relocate government away from Washington and back to the states. And how
did he present this idea? "Tenth Amendment," he proclaimed, "Tenth
Amendment!" That amendment, in its entirety, reads:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor
prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively,
or to the people.

But for those in the crowd who didn't know what that amendment
said-I judged it to be well in excess of 95 percent-Dole never
bothered to explain what the Tenth Amendment said.

On very rare occasions, he did stick to his speechwriters' texts.
After one such performance, according to the

**New York Times** obituary
, he
told reporters, "Stayed on message. Every time I do that 'reconnect
government to values' stuff, I feel like a plumber."

Joe Biden spent even more years in the Senate than Bob Dole, and he
seems to have emerged with somewhat better command of presidential
English. He's been curiously reluctant to display it, however, by
virtue of avoiding the mass audience altogether. To be sure, he travels
to events to tout one program or another. But the kind of serious
program-selling to the American people that his agenda clearly requires
has been nowhere in evidence. Prime-time TV talks from the Oval Office,
to make the case for the still largely obscure elements of the Build
Back Better bill, haven't happened. On the contrary, it's been
Republicans and Joe Manchin who've defined the bill to the public as a
massive spending endeavor, messages they pound on with a daily
remorselessness.

Effective messaging is a function of both quality (choosing the best
arguments and words) and quantity (making those arguments over and over
again to the largest audience possible). Dole was deficient on the
quality side; Biden, on the quantity. It may be, as I've written here,
that his aides fear his fluffing his lines, but if the antidote to that
is not to deliver any lines at all, then both Biden and his party are in
trouble in upcoming elections.

One master of the Senate (Robert Caro's phrase) who seldom warmed to
presidential prose was Lyndon Johnson, who suffered unfairly for being
thrust on center stage after the assassination of the most eloquent
president America had had in many years. But there was one occasion when
Johnson's language memorably soared. In 1965, a few days after Alabama
cops savagely beat the peaceful demonstrators crossing a bridge in Selma
(an attack which led every newscast that night), Johnson addressed a
joint session of Congress to call for the enactment of the Voting Rights
Act. Johnson implored and demanded that Congress enact the bill, with
all the rhetorical force that speechwriter Richard Goodwin had put on
the page and Johnson could convey to the nation. As I noted
in a piece I wrote for the

**Prospect**when Goodwin died in 2018,

the speech was about more than the bill, more even than voting rights.
It labeled white racism as America's abiding curse and invoked both
the best of our values and the lessons of Johnson's youth, teaching
impoverished Latino schoolchildren, to make the case why America had to
"overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice." To which
Johnson then famously added, "And we shall overcome."

I cite this speech, of course, because, just as Johnson rose to this
occasion, so Biden must rise to oppose our reversion to denying the
ballot to minorities, the poor, and the young, whose presence at the
polls Republicans are determined to deter, an assault on democracy with
which Senate Democrats still wedded to the filibuster appear inclined to
concur. If the right to vote is impeded by Biden's aides' reluctance
to put him center stage, we need either new aides or a new president.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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