Notes From My Knapsack 3-4-07
Jeff Gill

Countrymen, Lend Me Your Ears

Clint Eastwood doing translation from Italian to English on live television: how cool is that? Dirty Harry can order calamari in Napoli and flirt with the waitresses va bene. Of course he speaks the musical tongue of the land of spaghetti westerns, but it says something about what kind of artist he is that he bothered to do so, instead of sending a personal assistant to get his fried squid rings for him. So much for Oscar excitement.

I’m a big fan of the Tony Awards where the recipients not only rarely read off of a piece of paper, but they say interesting and unexpected things. The Morricone lifetime acheivement Oscar was the most exciting speech, and we knew about that one a month ago.

Speaking off the cuff in public is a rare talent; some would call it a gift. Doing so effectively under adverse circumstances is even less common. The bar was set in 1912 by Teddy Roosevelt, who was getting set to give a speech in Milwaukee, in his campaign for the presidency on the Bull Moose ticket. The Republican Party had left him behind in favor of William Howard Taft (you may recall his great-grandson, recent governor hereabouts), and TR wanted to make a stronger case against Woodrow Wilson than his party was willing to hear, so he ran as an independent. Stepping onto the platform, he was shot by a man who had stalked him for weeks, waiting for a clear shot. In Milwaukee, the moment came, and Roosevelt fell with a bullet in his chest.

Here’s how we know the speech was largely unread: Teddy stepped to the podium to calm the crowd, brandishing the text of the speech he was to give. The heavy paper, folded lengthwise in half and thrust in a jacket breast pocket, had slowed the bullet, along with the tweed jacket. His skin was broken, but the bullet lost enough energy going through the entire speech, twice, that it slid off a rib and stopped between them, just under the skin. He barely bled, and said he "just had the wind knocked out of him," like falling off a horse.

And then, still waving the pierced sheaf of paper, he gave his speech to a *very* attentive crowd.

Part of what had me thinking recently about that speech, and the value of a third party candidate, is the fairly dreary sheaf of candidates, R and D, we’ve got jostling already for the 2008 presidential election. Even Obama, whom I’d love to go hear speak, has policy idea number one still back in the focus groups, but next to nuttin’ in his speeches. And the GOP gang ­-- yikes.

What did a bruised, breathless, ultimately futile Teddy Roosevelt want to say on the platform in 1912? Why did he keep speaking to a rapt audience while his friends on the podium kept urging him to sit down and let attendants carry him off the stage? (He did go to a hospital after the speech and have the slug cut out of his chest and get wrapped in bandages.)

Here are the main points of the speech: Americans deserve an eight hour day, a forty hour week, with at least two weeks of paid vacation you could take without losing your job. He passionately maintained that factory child labor should be abolished all across the country, and that the minimum wage should apply to women who had paying work, just like it did for men.

That wild-eyed radical, Teddy Roosevelt.

For standing up for those "Progressive" views, he couldn’t even get a voice at either party convention; so he ran as an independent. He lost, but his ideas won.

Full disclosure: my first adult involvement in politics was to work for the Indiana state organization for John Anderson. No, he didn’t win, and while you couldn’t get him to say so in public, he knew he had not a prayer of winning. He also knew that he had precisely no ability to influence the Reagan ticket by helping him as an Illinois supporter, but could get issues on the table as a candidate. I liked his emphasis on the governmental responsibility to maintain infrastructure, which needed and needs a spotlight, other than new bridges to nowhere. His take on welfare reform was in line with what didn’t happen until the Clinton administration fifteen years later, and Anderson was passionate about public education, especially support for state universities as a primary piece of civic infrastructure and economic development. I still don’t regret working for him (he’s still alive, 85, and teaching in Florida, smart man that he is), and believe he influenced the debate to a useful degree. Could we use a strong third party voice this year? No, Nader hasn’t shown himself to have even Anderson level support, and his views are outliers from the perspective of most Americans. Anderson ran a fusion ticket, asking a Democratic governor to run with him.

I keep thinking Lieberman-Hagel, myself. They’d have courteous, incisive debates while they waited for the other candidates to show up for the sound check. Then they’d get really good . . .

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; throw your political opinions in the ring at knapsack77@gmail.com.