Bush Needs the Speech of His Career, Again : Turnaround: Backers hope he can regain the magic of ’88 convention performance. ‘He has been living and breathing this one,’ an aide says.

Four years ago, when George Bush was preparing for the most important speech of his political career, campaign media guru Roger Ailes assembled a videotaped collage of his past podium performances. It was not a pretty sight.

There he was, in a series of awkward poses, thoughts cascading, hands flailing, syntax garbled, eyes wandering. Ailes made Bush watch it over and over and over. What he saw was a performance worthy of a Saturday Night Live parody by comedian Dana Carvey. It was, says a senior White House aide, “the very worst of George Bush.”

Painful as it might have been for the chagrined candidate, the exercise apparently worked. Bush gave what is widely regarded as the best performance of his political speaking career at the 1988 Republican National Convention. It was an address that introduced Bush as the would-be President of a “kinder, gentler” America and drove home his ill-fated and now-broken pledge of “no new taxes.”

There, on the stage at New Orleans, was a new George Bush: calm, measured, speaking directly to each and every American, at times comforting, at times commanding.

But then, the election was over, the pressure gone, the crowds suddenly friendly. As his approval rating soared, thanks in large part to the success of Operation Desert Storm, the President of the United States reverted to his old, bad habits.

At the presidential lectern, his arms became windmills again. Thoughts came tumbling out in a torrent of free association. His grammar was so jumbled that a seventh-grade English teacher could spend weeks diagraming a George Bush sentence.

And now, once again, his standing in the polls is slipping, even two days into the national convention that Republican operatives were counting on to turn his political fortunes around.

As the country tunes in tonight to give Bush another chance to explain who he is and where he would lead the nation over the next four years, the candidate is staring into the eyes of potential political doom. If he is to get a significant bounce out of the convention, there is no time to spare, no opportunity to miss.

Once again, it comes down to his acceptance speech.

“This is a critically important speech,” said one long-time Bush adviser. “He has to rise to the same level of communication he did four years ago.”

Can he do it again? Can this man grown from generations of Yankee reticence, a public speaker who seems to combine all the rhetorical flourish of a Dwight D. Eisenhower and, on the podium at least, the physical grace of a Lyndon B. Johnson, once again turn out the speech of his career?

White House staff members, professional public speaking coaches and those who have watched Bush perform in high-pressure settings as President say it is a question of both content and style: what he says, how he says it and the public’s perception of his performance all figure into the equation.

“This is the first time I’ve seen him take command of a speech. He does not fully understand the potential of dramatic rhetoric or the downside of ineffective presentation,” said an aide who has observed the Bush speech-making process for more than a year. Nevertheless, the aide said, “he has been living and breathing this one.”

His task this year, said Larry J. Sabato, a professor of political science at the University of Virginia, is much more difficult than it was in 1988.

“One speech cannot convert a public that already has an opinion about him. Prosperity in 1988 predisposed some people to his message. A sour economy in 1992 predisposes them against him,” Sabato said.

“Redefining and reintroducing is much more difficult the second time around,” he said. “Retrospectively, Bush had three good, relatively prosperous years and then everything collapsed. The memory span is so short and it is difficult to remember the past. He has to remind people of everything they forgot about the accomplishments of the Bush Administration.”

Bragging on himself is not easy for George Bush. It is something his mother brought him up not to do. Indeed, Peggy Noonan, who wrote his 1988 convention speech, has recalled how difficult he finds it to speak in the first person. To begin a sentence with the word I does not come easily to a man in a line of work where successful practitioners regularly talk about their accomplishments.

Besides, said one long-time friend of the President, “making a speech is not George Bush’s favorite form of political communication.”

Given a choice, Bush would just as soon forgo standing up before thousands of people in the Astrodome and the cameras that will beam his speech to a nationwide audience, the friend observed. He is much more at ease rolling up his sleeves and plunging into a crowd at a strawberry festival in Florida, shaking hands and schmoozing while stuffing strawberry shortcake into his mouth and trying to lick a glob of whipped cream from his nose.

And, if he is going to make a speech, he would much prefer to ramble about than to be confined to a written text. It was not until the early days of his unsuccessful 1980 campaign for the Republican presidential nomination that his friend and political confidante James A. Baker III insisted that he work from a text, telling him, in effect: “George, you can’t campaign like this.”

Fast forward to January, 1992. Working once again without a text, the pressure on and the Adrenalin pumping at the end of one of his first days on the campaign trail in New Hampshire, here is George Bush, at his extemporaneous best:

“I do understand New Hampshire because I have this wonderfully warm feeling that New Hampshire feels exactly the way we do on these questions of family values and faith. Somebody said to me, we prayed for you over there (in Japan). That was not just because I threw up on the prime minister of Japan, either. Where was he when I needed him? I said, let me tell you something. And I say this--I don’t know whether any ministers from the Episcopal Church are here--I hope so. But I said to him this: You’re on to something here. You cannot be President of the United States if you don’t have faith. Remember Lincoln, going to his knees in times of trial and the Civil War and all that stuff. You can’t be. And we are blessed. So don’t feel sorry for--don’t cry for me, Argentina. We’ve got problems out there, and I am blessed by good health, strong health. Geez, you get the flu and they make it into a federal case. Anyway that goes with the territory. I’m not asking for sympathy, I just wanted you to know that I never felt more up for the charge.”

And here is Bush seven months later, speaking Wednesday at a luncheon in Houston where Republican faithful had paid $1,000 for a piece or two of fried chicken and a display of Angry George. The syntax was patched up, but the voice rose to a shrill, shouting pitch, and his chin jutted outward, a tired boxer forgetting some of his earliest lessons about not leading with his jaw:

“More people have taken the first breath of freedom than at any time in human history,” he said. But that upbeat sentence was delivered in an angry, defiant tenor.

Then there are the times when Bush has tried to talk about children. About education. About the homeless.

“Whenever I hear George Bush mention the word compassion , I reach for my earplugs,” said the long-time adviser. “Not that he doesn’t feel compassionate. But this is an area where he feels defensive. Homelessness, the environment, are basically Democratic issues. He can’t make them sing. That’s the difference between him and (Ronald) Reagan.”

And, he said, the most difficult time for Bush is when he “is speaking about things that are closest to his mind and heart . . . some of these softer passages that are given to him. That is when the face does not match the words. It is digging deep into his persona and you get into his shyness, the ‘you don’t talk about yourself’ problem.”

“I can’t stress it too strongly,” said a senior White House staff member. “With his Yankee rectitude, if he’s too polished, it reflects badly on him because he seems too vain.”

At one time, the herky-jerky movements were endearing, said a senior White House staff member, the broken phrasing quaint. No longer, he said.

“They’re kind of annoying. People want to see a President appear presidential. Does he exude confidence? Does he sound a bit too shrill? If people get a sense the President is feeling a little bit desperate, they’re going to ask what’s going on,” he said.

Kent McKamy, whose company, Fields and McKamy International in New York, helps train politicians and others in public speaking, suggests turning off the sound to determine how Bush is coming across to his television audience.

“You look at Bush and you get the sense of a guy with a furrowed brow, always on the run,” McKamy said. “When he smiles it looks forced. You don’t get the sense he’s the commander in chief.”

“When you’re going for an office like the presidency, you’re performing and you better know the tools of the trade of performing--never lose sight of the fact you’re on stage, entertaining, engaging their minds and imaginations, challenging and stimulating,” he said.

“George Bush’s hands never seem to go in the same direction as his speeches. His hand movements don’t match the words,” said McKamy’s partner, Linda Fields. “It’s eye contact and body language. His eyes wander all over the room, like he’s watching a tennis match.”

By contrast, she said, Bill Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, appears “very energetic” and offers “terrific eye contact.”