Jennifer Granholm: Let Us Wake Our Neighbors

One of the things Your Humble Blogger likes in a speech is a central metaphor. It’s helpful if that metaphor is timely, and it’s helpful if it’s visual. John Kennedy said “The torch has passed” Jesse Jackson said “Your patch is not big enough” and Winston Churchill said that “an Iron Curtain has descended”. We’re not in that category of memorable speeches, but Governor Jennifer Granholm of Michigan walked the Freedom Trail last night.

Do all you Gentle Readers know about the Freedom Trail in Boston? It’s a line of red bricks set into the sidewalks. It runs near the Fleet Center, where the delegates are convening, and past Paul Revere’s house, and the old North Church, and Faneuil Hall. It goes around Boston Common, to the State House, and past the Old South Meeting House. In the downtown tourist area, the streets have that red line, guiding you toward the next tourist stop. But in Boston, the downtown tourist area is the downtown; when you get out of the T to shop at Macy’s, you walk past the line of red bricks. When you go over to Mike’s for cannoli, you ... um ... cannoli. Mmmmmmm. By the way, the Boston Phoenix reports that there are no lines for Mike’s this week. I expect they delivered to Bill Clinton’s room. Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes, the line of bricks, which remind even the resident that you are on the Freedom Trail. You forget it, of course, thinking about those cannoli ... oh, my ... mmmmmm and then you remember it again.

So when Gov. Granholm talks about the Freedom Trail, for the probably forty or fifty million Americans who have visited Boston in the last ten years it’s an actual thing, red bricks in the sidewalk. And when she says “there's a Freedom Trail in America that never stops”, we can see it.

That Freedom Trail has run through a depression, where a president unable to stand lifted America from its knees. It has taken us through war, where a generation of young men stared down tyranny, and came home to build the Great American middle class. It has taken us into a new frontier, where a young president called our nation to service—a call so many answered, and so many still hear. And now, it runs again through Boston, where we are here to nominate a man who knows that the Freedom Trail's greatest opportunities yet lie before us.

What is the Freedom Trail? It’s a guide. It tells us which paths to take. And one thing we know, the fellow who’s picking the paths now has made a serious wrong turn. He’s lost. Which gives the Gov. the chance for the best (and most vicious) joke of the convention so far, pityingly saying that it’s hard for a man to stop and ask directions. Perfect! Isn’t that what Our Only President needs to do? Isn’t he like that frustrated but stubborn paterfamilias who won’t look at a map, listen to advice, or just stop and go back, but blunders on and on getting more and more lost? For crying out loud, we could have asked the locals!

When she talks about the economy, next, she does a nice epistrophe. “Throughout the Midwest, newspapers blare the headline: ‘State bleeds factory jobs.’ In North Carolina they're textiles jobs. In Dallas and Denver and Des Moines, they're technology jobs.” The emphasis on jobs is heavy, but not too heavy because of the different adjectives; the result is a powerful sense that everyone, everywhere, in every industry, is in danger of layoff. In fact, these are the first three of sixteen instances of the word jobs; it takes a light touch to put the same word sixteen times in less that thirteen hundred words without droning.

OK, next paragraph, the ‘doubly squeezed’ one. Check out the rhythm here, the four matched sentences, each with two parts. The first short, the second a bit longer, the third a bit longer, the fourth even longer. The easy trap would be to make it a metronome, to make it all sound the same. Breaking it up too much loses the whole point of it. She gets it right. And finishes it with a sentence about “two jobs”, which refers back to the “doubly squeezed” introduction, and the whole structure of the paragraph. It’s a textbook example of good speechwriting, without sounding like one to the listener. Masterful.

Then we get a nice anaphora of “Who will stand up for...” which gets a call-and-response thing going, which is always nice. Include the audience. Anacoenosis. Remember Ann Richards asking “Where was George?” If it doesn’t work, it’s dopey, but if it works, it’s the most memorable thing in a speech.

There are some other lovely things. The two paragraphs beginning “I'm the governor of Michigan” and “What's true for Michigan is true across America” do a great job of being both specific (therefore compelling) and general (therefore inclusive and persuasive). The transition back to the Freedom Trail via the New England Patriot line reads a bit awkwardly, but was smooth enough in the delivery. I particularly liked the reference to Pres. Clinton’s speech, as if she hadn’t written this speech two nights ago; it made it sound not spontaneous but also not preprogrammed. And it picks up the most powerful note of that speech, and puts it in the mouth of Paul Revere, tying it back into her own metaphor, and goes in to the big finish:

For the past 12 months John Kerry, like Paul Revere has been waking up America, calling us forth, announcing a new dawn in the American day.
Are you ready to answer the call? Then, let us wake our neighbors. Let us make the campaign trail our Freedom Trail. And let us follow that trail, all the way to the voting booth and “Kerry” this nation forward.

OK, the pun is bad on the page, but not so bad when spoken. And the rest is marvelous.

                           ,
-Vardibidian.