The Weekly Sift

One benefit of living in New Hampshire is the opportunity to listen to presidential candidates unfiltered by the national media. It wasn’t until I arrived here in 1996 that I realized just how distorting that filter can be: Early in each cycle, the press corps decides on a narrative for each candidate, and from there on it’s very hard for any other message to get through.

For example, in 2003 Howard Dean was the anti-war candidate. That’s what I expected to hear when I went to see him, and when he instead talked about a wide range of issues, I thought he must be making a real effort to broaden his appeal. But when I read the press coverage the next morning, it only mentioned the anti-war parts of his speech. If I hadn’t been there, I would have thought the anti-war candidate gave another anti-war speech. In fact, I eventually discovered, Dean had given his standard stump speech, which had always been about a wide range of issues. It just never got covered that way.

In the same campaign, I listened to John Kerry and blogged about his talk, not realizing that I had totally ignored what became the mainstream-media story: Kerry calling for “regime change in the United States“. If you were there, it was a throw-away line in an otherwise serious talk about where America was heading and where it needed to go. If you weren’t there, it was the only line you heard.

Ever since, I’ve tried to listen to as many candidates’ stump speeches as I can. Often they contain a lot of slanted statistics and mis-stated facts — which are instructive in their own way — but they also constitute a candidate’s best answer to the fundamental question of any presidential campaign: Where does America need to go and why am I the person to lead us there?

It’s important not to lose sight of that, or to get lost in all the clever remarks and wardrobe choices and inside-baseball strategizing. Where does this candidate think America needs to go and why is s/he the one to lead us there?

Fortunately, in the YouTube era you don’t have to live in New Hampshire or Iowa to hear a stump speech. So in this series I’m going to link to videos and/or transcripts of stump speeches of all the major candidates as they start campaigning, and I’m going to take them seriously. I’ll fact-check, pull out larger themes, compare to other candidate’s speeches, and think about the parts of the picture I think are being left out.

Watch the speeches with me and add your comments. I’m going to start later today with Ted Cruz’s Liberty University speech, and I plan to update this post throughout the year as more candidates announce and more stump speeches become available.

Speeches discussed so far: Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Bernie Sanders (plus Sanders’ Liberty University speech), Rick Santorum, Hillary Clinton, Ben Carson.