Aristotle's art

What I learned about writing from the DNC convention

Image courtesy Reuters

If there is one thing you learn in a lifetime of following politics, it is that what a pol says – especially on the stump during election time – has little or no bearing on what he/she will do once she gets your vote.

I don’t sip deep from the “Democrats all good” Kool Aid. To take just one example, the just-concluded DNC convention in Chicago showcased an emotional appeal by the parents of an American held hostage by Hamas – but elsewhere, a young woman got chucked out of a Harris/Walz rally for wearing a Free Gaza t-shirt.

Trump is an unabashed Netanyahu fan, and that is both understandable and reprehensible. The Biden Democrats, on the other hand, are supposedly the party of human rights – and yet, they not merely shield Israeli genocide in Gaza, they actively abet it.

The RNC convention this year was a dark, joyless, nihilistic exercise. The throughline seemed to be Trump’s riff on a favourite Modi trope – that everything about America was bad till he came along; that nobody respected America till Trump decided to step up and do something about it.

The Democrats have, ever since Harris replaced Biden on the ticket, been “joyful” with a capital J — the party line this time round seems to be that participating in the political process is necessary, vital even, but you can have fun doing it. And while I take the Democrats with a side of salt (just like I do the Congress party here at home), I’ll say this – they know how to throw a coming-out party.

Kamala Harris turned protocol on its head by wandering onto the stage on day one during the Beyonce show. On day two, in a ballsy move targeting Trump’s softest spot – crowd sizes -- the Democrats filled both the United Centre in Chicago and the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, venue of the July RNC convention, at the same time. And then there was the totally lit roll call, with a DJ spinning state-appropriate music as the various delegations were heard from.

Beyond such highlights, the DNC convention was a heady showcase of oratory in excelsis.

I love speeches. I learn more about writing from reading a good speech than from almost any other source.

One of the ways to improve your writing is by reading out loud what you have written. Words, even when read silently, make sounds in your head. When you read your own writing out loud, not only does the ear catch glitches the eye didn’t spot, you also get a sense of the rhythms of your prose — where the words are making music, where the rhythm is flagging and needs adjusting.

So yeah – I love speeches for what I can learn about fashioning a persuasive argument, for structure, for transitions, for the use of rhetorical devices, and for the rhythms of a pitch-perfect delivery,

Listening to speeches at the DNC is my secret vice, one I get to indulge in every four years – and it doesn’t hurt that the Democrats can field an all-star lineup. My recent travels were hectic but even so, I woke up earlier than I had to and slept later than I could afford to be able to catch up with the prime-time speakers over the first three days.

I don’t know whether Michelle Obama still works with Sarah Hurwitz, her speechwriting collaborator from her days as First Lady – but listen to her speech at the 2016 convention (transcript) and now in Chicago (full transcript), and the similarities in style are unmistakable.

Michelle Obama loves the tricolon; it is her go-to rhetorical device, coupled with the use of repetition. From 2016:

That is the story of this country, the story that has brought me to this stage tonight, the story of generations of people who felt the lash of bondage, the shame of servitude, the sting of segregation, but who kept on striving and hoping and doing what needed to be done so that today I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves.

Early on, she uses anaphora – the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive phrases or clauses. The word “story”, repeated thrice at the beginning of this passage, builds up a rhythm. Anaphora is common in speechwriting; perhaps the most famous example comes from Martin Luther King, who used ‘I have a dream’ repeatedly to establish a pattern (transcript).

Once she has her bass line going, the drums kick in with the use of the tricolon: “the lash of bondage, the shame of servitude, the sting of segregation”, the pace quickening even further with “striving and hoping and doing…”

Another rhetorical device favoured by both Michelle and Barack Obama is the evangelical call and response – and Michelle Obama, even more than her husband, is a master at this.

The technique has been showcased often through this convention — the most pervasive example being various speakers talking of Trump’s disastrous policies and ending with speaker and crowd joining in the chorus of “We are not going back.”

Michelle Obama does it more elegantly. Early in her speech, notice how she invokes Kamala Harris’s mother to seed “Do something”. Midway through, she again brings up the phrase — almost in passing, but it serves to prep the ground for what is to follow. And then, as she rounds into her peroration, she invokes “Do something” in classic call/response style.

So if they lie about her, and they will, we’ve got to do something. If we see a bad poll, and we will, we’ve got to put down that phone, and do something. If we start feeling tired, if we start feeling that dread creeping back in, we’ve got to pick ourselves up, throw water on our face, and what? [Crowd chants back: “Do Something!”]

While the rhetorical template of her 2016 and 2024 speeches are the same, two points in Michelle Obama’s speech in Chicago – and in that of several others – struck me as significant.

The first is the voluntary abdication of the moral high ground. “When they go low, we go high,” was a Michelle Obama theme in 2016 – but that was then. This time around, the Democrats seem to be done with playing nice – the attacks on Trump were direct and, at times, borderline vicious. (Michelle’s “black jobs” jibe in this speech is a telling example; Bill Clinton riff on Trump’s constant reference to “the late, great Hannibal Lecter” was another, but they were by no means the only ones, nor even the most pointed ones).

The other point, across speeches, was the repeated emphasis on the hard work that lies ahead. Successive speakers, including MO, emphasised that while there is a pervasive sense of joy in the moment, and while the support for the Harris/Walz ticket seems to be growing stronger by the day, the election is by no means a done deal. ‘You can’t take the outcome for granted, you’ve got to do the hard yards over the next two and a half months…’ was a recurring motif.

Clearly, the pain of losing in 2016 has left scars that are yet to heal. Equally clearly, the DNC brass have concluded that a large part of the reason was over-confidence, the belief in the inevitability of a Hillary Clinton win over Donald Trump. This time round, they seem hell bent on not repeating that mistake — hence Harris’s multiple trips to Wisconsin, a state Hillary Clinton neglected during her 2016 run in an omission that cost her dearly; hence, too, the exhortation to the faithful to work their butts off.

There were many good speeches across the first three days. There was Bill Clinton (video and transcript) in his explainer-in-chief mode, undercutting the “Harris is policy-lite” Republican attacks by laying out an economic agenda for a Harris administration.

There was Barack Obama (video and transcript), unusually for him, launching a blistering attack on Trump.

Joe Biden, who took to the stage close to midnight on day one, was a revelation (video and transcript). The incumbent was vigorous, feisty, combative, and at times startlingly outspoken – as for instance when, referring to Trump’s serial insults of Army veterans, he said:

Who in the hell does he think he is? Who does he think he is? There’s no words for a person. They are not the words of a person—not worthy of being a commander-in-chief, period. Not then. Not now. And not ever.

What stood out for me though was when he gave voice to a deeply felt hurt -- hurt that he had been unceremoniously brushed aside by the media, the public, and by his own party. Referencing the song American Anthem (Here is the Norah Jones version), Biden reminded his party that it hadn’t been fair to him:

I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my career, but I gave my best to you. For 50 years, like many of you, I’ve given my heart and soul to our nation. And I’ve been blessed a million times in return with the support of the American people.

I’ve either been too young to be in the Senate because I wasn’t 30 yet and too old to stay as President. But I hope you know how grateful I am to all of you.

That was a gut punch from a man who, supposedly borderline senile, delivered an almost perfect speech without once missing the beat, at an hour when most people would be thinking of bed. The TV cameras underlined the poignancy of that moment by focusing on Nancy Pelosi, reportedly the moving spirit behind the DNC putsch that led to Biden’s dropping out, chanting “We love Joe” with the rest of the crowd.

There were other great speeches over the first three days – too many to detail here. But from the point of view of writing and the art of rhetoric, two stood out: those of Pete Buttigieg and Tim Walz.

Buttigieg’s speech (video and transcript) was a masterclass in writing (and delivery). At no time did he mention that he was gay, and married — he didn’t need to, a couple of tangential references were enough, and he slipped them in with an easy grace.

His leitmotif was the need for “a better class of politics”, and what was remarkable was how seamlessly he drew the contrast with what he called Trump’s politics of darkness.

What stood out for me was the way he first set up a vision of a better type of politics, and then personalised it. If his insistence that politics could be better sounded naive, he said, “let me insist that I have come to this view not by way of idealism, but by way of experience.”

He then took his audience into his dining room, and with wry humour spoke of his daily struggles to get his two three-year-olds to wash their hands and sit at the table — an instantly relatable image for his audience.

He then linked that everyday scene with the larger theme of good politics, and connected his lived experience with that of his listeners:

This kind of life went from impossible to possible, from possible to real, from real to almost ordinary in less than half a lifetime. But that didn’t just happen, it was brought about through idealism and courage, through organizing and persuasion and storytelling, and yes, through politics. The right kind of politics. The kind of politics that can make an impossible dream into an everyday reality. I don’t presume to know what it’s like in your kitchen, but I know, as sure as I am standing here, that everything in it, the bills you pay at that table, the shape of the family that sits there, the fears and the dreams that you talk about late into the night there, all of it compels us to demand more from our politics than a rerun of some TV wrestling death match.

As an example of how to make politics personal, to take the ugly out of politics, to make it relatable, and to emphasise the need to choose our politics, and politicians, wisely, that part of his speech is something you want to cut, keep, and refer to often when writing, and when teaching how to write.

Finally, Tim Walz – now firmly enshrined in the American imagination as the friendly neighbourhood dad-cum-coach (video and transcript).

Multiple speakers had made the point about the need to buckle down and get to work – but none so forcefully as Walz did when, drawing on his “coach” image, he rounded into the climax of his speech with the political version of a locker room pep talk:

You know, you might not know it, but I haven’t given a lot of big speeches like this. (Which is stretching it a bit – the man has been a three time Congressman and a Governor, and he didn’t get there without giving his share of stump speeches.) But I have given a lot of pep talks. So let me finish with this, team. It’s the fourth quarter. We’re down a field goal. But we’re on offense and we’ve got the ball. We’re driving down the field. And boy, do we have the right team.

Kamala Harris is tough. Kamala Harris is experienced. And Kamala Harris is ready. Our job, our job, for everyone watching, is to get in the trenches and do the blocking and tackling. One inch at a time. One yard at a time. One phone call at a time. One door knock at a time. One $5 donation at a time.

The use of a metaphor from a sport that is intrinsically linked to his biography, the rising tempo, that pulse-pounding drumroll finish — brilliant, both in conception and execution.

The first three days of the DNC felt like I was binge-watching Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing. You love President Josiah Bartlett to bits, you play his speeches on loop, and you wish Martin Sheen would stand for election; you thrill to the mixed martial political arts of Josh, to the “writing” of Toby and of Sam Seaborn and, at least while you are watching, you inhabit a world where politicians are as near perfect as any human being can aspire to be.

Then the end credits roll, and you are back in the real world. It was good while it lasted, though.

PostScript: Finally back from my travels, in a state of mental and physical exhaustion, and staring at a pile of work that accumulated during my away-time.

There is this, though – day four DNC speeches to listen to, and Rahul Bhatia’s ‘The Identity Project’, a book I have long been looking forward to, finally to hand.

PPS: The reference in the headline is to this book.

Have a good weekend, all.