Say What You Mean

For years, I found Democrats’ fear to engage in an open defense of abortion frustrating. How did it help to couch your defense as “safe, legal, and rare” for example? Why not just say it’s a human right? Well, things sure are different today. Rick Perlstein makes an excellent point about this sort of thing.

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.

ou 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.

I do recognize that politicians exist in the context of their times and there was a lot of reason to hide liberalism in a nation sprinting to the right during these years. But then, did it help Michael Dukakis? All doing so did was allow George Bush and Lee Atwater to lie about him being a liberal, which he was not. Dukakis had no defense and was afraid to make one. But Clinton and Obama struggled to just make plain points about how liberalism was good, they were right, and Republicans were as monstrous as they claimed in their own words. It was very frustrating!

To say the least, Kamala Harris’ DNC speech was not that way. It was a plainspoken damnation of the modern conservative movement and what was at stake. Back to Perlstein:

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.