Two Speeches

The Two Speeches That Explain American Politics Right Now

Forget the candidates—it’s Rudy vs. Cory you need to pay attention to.

By Michael Grunwald

The 2016 conventions featured a plagiarism scandal and a WikiLeaks scandal, a snub by Ted Cruz and a nonsnub by Bernie Sanders, Republicans chanting “lock her up!” and Democrats chanting “not a clue!” Republicans heard from the National Rifle Association, a Benghazi mom and Scott Baio; Democrats heard from Planned Parenthood, Black Lives Matter moms, and Meryl Streep. The parties nominated two well-known but not well-liked candidates, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, as well as their less controversial two-syllable sidekicks, Mike Pence and Tim Kaine. There were high-profile speeches by six Trumps, three Clintons and two Obamas.

But if you want to understand the gulf between the two conventions and the two parties in just two speeches, you should watch Republican Rudy Giuliani’s fiery stem-winder in Cleveland and then Democrat Cory Booker’s exuberant address in Philadelphia. Giuliani, a 72-year-old white man who stepped down as mayor of New York 15 years ago, outlined a dark vision of fear and fury. Booker, a 47-year-old black man who is now a senator from New Jersey, delivered an optimistic message of love and togetherness. Neither high-energy, high-volume speech got much attention in real time, but both channeled the moods of their parties.

For the Republicans in Cleveland, that mood was scared and angry—and more precisely, angry about being scared. And the Giuliani New Yorkers remember as a moderate who was progressive on social issues and immigration and once endorsed Democrat Mario Cuomo for governor was nowhere to be found. He began his speech with a blunt description of a nation traumatized by out-of-control crime and a constant threat of terrorism, his voice rising with every sentence: “The vast majority of Americans today do not feel safe. They fear for their children. They fear for themselves. They fear for their police officers, who are being TARGETED!”

Moments later, Giuliani was screaming at the top of his lungs about the ingratitude of Black Lives Matter-style critics of police departments, often seeming to add multiple exclamation points to ordinary sentences. He noted that when you call the police, “they don’t ask if you’re black or white, THEY JUST COME TO SAVE YOU!!!” He led the crowd in a ferocious chant of “THANK YOU!” to police, somehow converting that anodyne courtesy phrase into a Democrats-don't-care attack line. He suggested President Obama has inflamed racial tensions, a common gripe among the overwhelmingly white delegates in Cleveland: “What happened to ‘There’s no black America, no white America, just AMERICA?’ WHAT HAPPENED TO IT? WHERE DID IT GO?

Booker’s speech a week later in Philadelphia—The City of Brotherly Love, as he pointed out—had a much cheerier vibe, and even though he’s deviated from liberal orthodoxy on some educational and financial issues, it had a Kumbaya liberal vibe, too. His theme was how every generation has worked together to make America a more perfect union—“more inclusive, more expansive, more just.” The Americans who signed the Declaration of Independence, he said, were also making a declaration of interdependence, “an extraordinary commitment to each other.” He repeatedly echoed Clinton’s “Stronger Together” slogan, declaring that rugged individualism didn’t beat the British, reach the moon, build the interstates, or map the human genome: “We did that together!”

That’s been a familiar (if slightly corny) sentiment in Obama’s speeches, but Booker took it even further into New Age hippie-talk, arguing that the ultimate patriotic American value is not mere tolerance but actual love. “You can’t love your country without loving your countrymen and countrywomen,” he said. “We don’t always have to agree, but we must be there for each other, we must empower each other, we must find common ground.” Love, he said, is even a source of national security. “Love recognizes that we need each other, that we as a nation are better together, that when we are divided we are weak, yet when we are united, we are strong.” Even in the depths of the Civil War, Booker reminded the cheering crowd, Abraham Lincoln promised “malice towards none and charity towards all.”

Giuliani is not exactly a malice-towards-none guy. But his snarling get-tough approach did help tame the mean streets of New York, ratcheting down crime and murder rates even as he frequently alienated minority communities. In Cleveland, he didn’t attribute that progress to common purpose or interdependence or love. He attributed it to his own heroic leadership. “I turned New York City into America’s safest city,” Giuliani said. “And what I did for New York, Donald Trump will do for America!”

This was another big theme in Cleveland, the notion that Trump will destroy ISIS, balance the budget, and Make America Great Again through his own sheer strength of will and excellence of brain. But Trump hasn’t provided much detail about his plans for achieving those goals, and his convention speakers (including his wife and children) didn’t provide much detail about what he's really like. Giuliani tried to fill in a few blanks, calling Trump “a man with a big heart,” but his evidence was laughably implausible. Trump often makes grandiose public pledges to charities, and The Washington Post has exposed how he almost never fulfills them, but Giuliani claimed he actually makes anonymous donations to charities, because he’s too humble to want his generosity known. “He asked not to be mentioned,” Giuliani said. “Well, I’m going to break my promise to him. I’m going to mention it.” He mentioned no specifics.

The Republicans spent less time at their convention talking up Trump than trashing Clinton as a two-faced criminal who threatens American security. Giuliani fervently joined the attack, accusing her of “dereliction of duty” in Benghazi, and of lying to the families of the victims. “RIGHT TO THEIR FACES!” he screamed. He also accused Obama of being too politically correct to utter the words “Islamic extremist terrorism,” which explained “why our enemies see us as weak and vulnerable.” He noted that “for the purposes of the media,” as if he wouldn’t have included caveats if he hadn’t been on the record, he wasn’t talking about all Muslims. But he worked himself into a frenzy over his desire to obliterate Muslim extremists: “You know who you are! AND WE’RE COMING TO GET YOU!!!”

There was nothing subtle or touchy-feely about Giuliani’s rhetoric. He was making an emotional call to arms, a daddy-party appeal to a frightened public. The closest he came to a policy argument was attacking Clinton’s willingness to accept Syrian refugees in the United States: “They’re going to come here and kill us!”

Booker is the former mayor of Newark, a Stanford University and Yale Law School graduate who chose to live in his city’s public housing as a public servant. He’s like an anti-Giuliani, with a sunny disposition and a savvy for social media, and while his speech was nearly as passionate as Giuliani’s, it was less muscular and more intellectual, less I than we, less kicking ass and more working in harmony. He quoted an African proverb: “If you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together.” He also quoted NYU law professor Bryan Stevenson on criminal justice reform and borrowed his closing theme of stubborn renewal—“you may trod me into the very dirt, but still, like dust, I rise”—from the poet Maya Angelou. While Giuliani and Trump stood entirely with the police over the recent turmoil, Booker not only called for more love for cops, but also for “courageous empathy” for anti-police protesters.

Booker’s kindergarten-teacher message of love and togetherness didn’t stop him from taking shots at Trump, but they were all about Trump’s offenses against love and togetherness. He portrayed the Republican nominee as a bully who mocks people and stokes fear, who made racist comments about Mexicans and sexist comments about women, who got rich in Atlantic City while stiffing his employees and creditors, who wants to keep Muslims out of America because of their religion.

“At our best, we stand up to bullies,” Booker said. “We fight those who seek to demean and degrade other Americans.”

Similarly, Booker’s pitch for Clinton was that she’s a We woman, that she’ll be a Together president, that she wants to lift the poor out of poverty at home and build coalitions through diplomacy abroad. “Hillary Clinton knows what Donald Trump betrays time and time again, that we are not a zero-sum nation,” Booker said. “It is not you and me. It is not one American against another American. It is you and I, together, interdependent, interconnected, with one single interwoven destiny.”

It’s an uplifting message, if perhaps a bit goofy, but it’s not clear how much it resonates after tragedies like San Bernardino, Orlando and Dallas. The Republicans are portraying America as a massive crime scene, even though violent crime is actually down nationwide, and terrorism as the catastrophe of our time, even though terrorists kill fewer Americans every year than lightning strikes. Trump is an extraordinarily unorthodox candidate, but the implication of his candidacy is that desperate times call for unusual approaches. He has described Obama’s America in remarkably apocalyptic terms, and Giuliani set the tone in Cleveland by describing 2016 as the last chance to stop Obama-ism.

“There’s no next election,” he said. “This is it. There’s no more time to revive this country.”

That was the heart of the Republican argument in Cleveland, that America is collapsing, and that Trump is the only hope to restore its greatness. It can work only if Americans are truly scared, which is one reason the GOP rhetoric is so scary. The Democratic message has been more nuanced—not that things are perfect, but that things are better, and that talking down a great country is a cynical political ploy. It’s that the world isn’t on fire, that the economy isn’t a mess, and that, as Clinton said in her own convention speech, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

“Cynicism is a refuge for cowards,” Booker said. “This is the home of the brave.”