In Accepting, Forget the Oratory, Focus on the Politics

WASHINGTON — When Texas Gov. George W. Bush accepts the Republican presidential nomination Thursday night, he’ll need to do more than give a powerful, well-delivered speech.

He must answer four key questions that can make or break a presidential candidate: Who am I? What do I believe? What do I want to do? And what’s wrong with the other guy?

First-time presidential candidates such as Bush get their crucial chance to address these four points during their acceptance speeches, when a national television audience is watching them explain themselves. Candidates should remember the acceptance speech is a political event, not a literary exercise or oratorical contest. What matters isn’t eloquence or elocution; it’s effectiveness at making points that will prevail throughout the thrust-and-parry of the campaign, while creating no openings their opponents can exploit.

This lesson is especially important for a candidate like Bush, whose party is out of the White House and holds its convention before the incumbent party’s. That means the other guy gets the last word and can counterpunch you out of contention. Consider what happened to the man Bush’s father beat 12 years ago.

Just like the younger Bush, Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis arrived at the convention as the nominee of a united party and the front-runner for the presidency. He was a well-regarded Democratic governor whom voters preferred to a vice president better known for his loyalty than his leadership. This seemed sufficient to turn an administration out of office, even at a time of peace and prosperity.

The usually downbeat Dukakis gave a seemingly successful speech, with an emotional tribute to his immigrant parents and an eloquent description of the American Dream. When the applause ended, he led Vice President George Bush by 17 points.

Soon after, in his own acceptance speech, Bush began demolishing Dukakis, presenting the governor as an elitist liberal who coddled criminals, busted his budget and befouled Boston Harbor.

Dukakis had left himself wide open in his speech. By declaring “This election isn’t about ideology--it’s about competence,” Dukakis invited Bush to offer his own--unchallenged--description of the differences between the candidates. And, by concluding his speech with an ancient Athenian oath of citizenship, Dukakis handed Bush an opportunity to define one of those differences: reciting the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance, which Bush claimed Dukakis didn’t require in his state’s schools.

Just as important was what Dukakis didn’t say: what he believed and what was wrong with Bush. Not until the last two weeks of the campaign, when Dukakis told audiences he was “on your side,” while Bush favored the rich, did the Democrat draw distinctions between himself and his opponent.

In his acceptance speech, how will George W. Bush address the four essential issues: biography, philosophy, policy and differentiation? Will he leave himself open to attack by his Democratic rival, Vice President Al Gore?

When it comes to biography, candidates try to claim that, as President Bill Clinton once said self-mockingly, “I was born in a log cabin that I built myself.” Thus, Richard M. Nixon reintroduced himself in 1968 as a small-town kid who grew up listening late at night to the sound of the train whistles, and Clinton recast himself in 1992 from the war-protesting Rhodes scholar to the “man from Hope,” his Arkansas hometown.

With help from wordsmith Peggy Noonan, the elder Bush became less a product of privilege than a prototypical GI Joe, heroic but humble. He offered himself as a World War II bomber pilot who later made his fortune in Texas, while living the middle-class dream: “high-school football on Friday nights, Little League, neighborhood barbecue.”

While his son has more of a common touch, having grown up in that all-American world his father described, he also has a daunting task: presenting himself as a person of presidential caliber. Will he talk about what he did as a younger man before buying the Texas Rangers in 1989, at age 42, and becoming governor in 1995, a period when, he has hinted, his life was unfocused and even undisciplined?

Bush has honed a stump speech that he delivers in a relaxed, engaging manner, with some of the most uplifting oratory of this prosaic political year. Audiences applaud when Bush calls for “replacing the ethic of ‘If it feels good, do it,’ with ‘the responsibility era.’ ” They nod in agreement when he says, “The success of America has never been proven by cities of gold but by citizens of character.”

Using a rhetoric that melds evangelical theology with pop psychology, Bush will try to flesh out his philosophy of “compassionate conservatism”: enlisting community organizations and religious institutions to solve social problems. If he succeeds, he’ll tap into a tradition of American thought that’s generous to folks in need but skeptical of government programs in theory, if not in practice.

When it comes to policy prescriptions, Bush stands on shakier ground. While he’s been applauded for his courage and clarity in proposing private-school vouchers, the partial privatization of Social Security and substantial tax cuts, surveys show most voters have more confidence in the Democrats to handle such issues as education, retirement security and taxes. In explaining his program, Bush will need to walk a rhetorical tightrope, claiming to support the purposes of public education and Social Security, while maintaining they need to be reformed. He’ll need to offer something between glittering generalities and numbing details.

Finally, Bush faces the dilemma of distinguishing himself from Gore. The same surveys that show Bush trailing on issues such as health care and the environment show him leading on restoring morality to government and society. Instead of bashing Gore or rehashing the Clinton scandals, Bush shrewdly presents himself as a unifying figure who will take the poison out of politics, in implicit contrast to his more strident rival. Bush called for a “tone of respect and bipartisanship” in politics in a speech last month on Gore’s home turf, Knoxville, Tenn., and he’s likely to make this point again Thursday night.

All the while, Bush will be wondering how Gore will respond in his acceptance speech. Addressing his own vulnerability--that he was born, raised and remains a Washington insider--the vice president can present himself as someone who grew up in two worlds. Yes, he went to school in Washington, but he worked summers on his family farm. Yes, he went to Harvard, but he also served in Vietnam.

As he’s done recently, Gore will say he’s in politics to fight for “the people against the powerful.” Implicitly and explicitly, he’ll accuse Bush of favoring “the HMOs, Big Oil and the drug companies,” while offering the rest of us “the crumbs of compassion.”

When Bush begins the battle of the nationally broadcast speeches Thursday night--and Gore responds two weeks later--it won’t matter how many memorable phrases they coin or standing ovations they get. What counts is how many debating points you score, especially when it comes to defining yourself and your opponent. And if Bush doesn’t believe that, he should just ask Dukakis.