Thanks to Todd and Matt for their great posts and I want to pick up on a point that Matt made about the importance of context in great speechwriting. Matt was absolutely right to highlight it: the most effective campaign speeches have generally been those that most closely reflected the desires of the American people.

As Todd Gitlin noted, Herbert Hoover's "tribute to rugged individualism" was a product of a specific moment in history - the calm before the storm of the Great Depression. As the famed historian Richard Hofstadter said of our 29th President, "The things Hoover believed in - efficiency, enterprise, opportunity, individualism, substantial laissez-faire, personal success, material welfare - were all in the dominant American tradition. The ideas he represented - ideas that to so many people made him seem hateful or ridiculous after 1929 - were precisely the same ideas that in the remotest past of the nineteenth century and the more immediate past of the New Era had had an almost irresistible lure for the majority of Americans."

Of course, as we all know, by 1932 Hoover was hopelessly out of touch; practically an overnight anachronism, unable and unwilling to shift course. Instead it was FDR's call for bold, persistent experimentation and his pledge of a New Deal for the American people that resonated. Nonetheless, it's worth noting that even in 1932, as the country was mired in economic depression, Roosevelt did not run for President on a liberal agenda. He even attacked Hoover for increasing government spending and not balancing the budget. Roosevelt understood that while the country was ready to reject conservatism at the polls, it didn't mean voters were ready to embrace liberalism. That would come later. As a speechwriter, you're always taught that the first lesson is to know your audience and that was certainly the case with FDR, who had almost a preternatural ability to understand the political temperature of the country at any given moment.

Another great example of this phenomenon is our most maligned President, the eminently forgettable Warren Harding. When Harding ran for President in 1920, the country was exhausted from eight years of progressive politics and the national tumult over America's entry into World War I and the subsequent battles over the League of Nations. So even though Harding's speeches were described by H.L. Mencken as akin to a "hippopotamus struggling to free itself from a slough of molasses," it was little surprise that voters overwhelmingly responded to his message of "not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality but sustainment in triumphant nationality."

Amazingly these rather unaffecting words captured the mood of the American people in 1920- helping Harding score more than 60% of the popular vote.
Of course, for all the success of these speeches - there are those that didn't work so well and were out of step with the direction the American people wanted the country to go: To my mind one of the most interesting examples is Mario Cuomo's legendary 1984 keynote address to the Democratic convention.
Today, it's considered one of the finest speeches in recent American oratory, but for all its beauty it failed to reflect the larger context of American politics in the mid-1980s. By that point, the once dominant New Deal Coalition that helped Democrats dominate American politics from the 1930s to the 1970s was moving away from traditional class warfare rhetoric and charges of Republican 'heartlessness.'

FDR's "forgotten man" had become a middle manager living in suburbia with 2 children, a mortgage to pay off and a gnawing fear about how he/she was going to make ends meet. As the America people's financial and political concerns were changing, the Democrats were seemingly still wedded to the ideologies of the past -- unwilling and seemingly unable to evolve.

For millions of Americans, the Democrats were becoming the party of big government solutions, loyalty to liberal interest groups and tax-and-spend economic policies. The populism that had once driven the Democrat's success was now seen as reserved for the poor - not the middle class. Moreover, at a time when Americans were happy with the direction of the country, Cuomo was offering a vision of America that ran counter to what millions were seeing outside their own windows and in their neighborhoods. The economic uncertainty to which Cuomo spoke; the calls for social justice and the focus on the poorest members of American society didn't reflect the concerns of the middle class.

What's worse, Cuomo's message was sounding depressingly paternalistic and even elitist. Cuomo pledged that Democrats must guide the American people to their way of thinking. "We must get the American public to look past the glitter, beyond the showmanship to the reality, the hard substance of things" and the party "will bring people to their senses" Cuomo argued. He told the assembled delegates. He bemoaned that the "disastrous quality" of the President's record was "not more fully understood by the American people." How did he explain this apparent 'disconnect;' "I can only attribute to the President's amiability and the failure by some to separate the salesman from the product," said Cuomo. There was in Cuomo's words an unmistakable sense that Americans were not smart enough to see the 'real' troubles in the country.

Cuomo's words were beautiful and moving, but they were more reflective of the past than the challenges of the present and the future. For all his eloquence, Cuomo did little to arrest the Democrats continuing decline - if anything, it likely reinforced it and placed the country in even greater lockstep with the conservative populism being preached by Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party.
Sometimes a great campaign speech; even one with a powerful idea will flat if it fails to resonate with the larger audience. In many respects, Cuomo's wonderful keynote is the quintessential example.

There is a lesson here for Obama and McCain. At a time when the country is worried about the direction of the country and intensely worried about the economy they will be looking for a message from the two candidates that speaks directly to those concerns. Here again, Obama is doing a much better job -- and that context really matters.

Obama's message is one of overriding change; a not surprisingly powerful theme for a change election. McCain's message is you can't trust the other guy. Now in some elections that strategy will work pretty well; 1988 and 2004 come to mind. But, historically Americans have found a far greater propensity to embrace change at times of national upheaval - this was certainly the case in 1932, 1960, 1968, 1980 and 1992.. In each of these elections, relatively untested leaders (and in the case of Richard Nixon in 1968, generally disliked) were to able to break through because the desire for change was significantly greater than the desire to maintain the status quo.

I've made this point in my earlier post, but McCain is really dropping the ball on this one. He is spending all of his time talking about the iniquities of his opponent and not enough about his plans to get the country out of its national funk. He is, to Matt's point, missing the larger context of the 2008 race for the White House. Until McCain figures out a way to put forward a message that reflects the larger desire for change he's going to have a very hard time bringing undecided voters on board; no matter how good a job he does at scaring Americans about Barack Hussein Obama.