CONNOR HOFFMAN
Managing Editor
In October, former presidential speechwriter Craig Smith came to Fredonia to lecture on the 2016 election prior to the second televised debate. The Leader conducted this interview with him, which has been condensed.
As a former speechwriter, how do you feel about the stump and convention speeches we’ve seen this year?
The speechwriters have done some good jobs. I thought Marco Rubio gave marvelous speeches. I thought John Kasich was very authentic in a conversational style, and that’s the way he should go. When Trump has been on message, he has been much more effective. In other words, when he listens to his speechwriters, he’s more effective than when he doesn’t. For example, he stayed on script on his acceptance speech at the Republican Convention and came out with a bounce, and then unfortunately, the next day he goes after Ted Cruz and then next day, he goes after someone else and ruins the whole effect. His speech at the convention was too long, but it was well-structured and concluded with the four themes that he had used each day of the convention, so there was a nice symmetry to it. I think Hillary Clinton had some well-written speeches, and the problem with Hillary Clinton is her delivery is so wooden and so robotic that she ruins good speechwriters’ work. The exception in this election was in the South Carolina primary. When she won the South Carolina primary, her acceptance speech was one of the best speeches she’s ever given, and people ought to look at that because she finally hit the right tone in terms of emotion and delivery and seemed authentic, but she never got back to that again.
How do you feel that two of the most unpopular candidates in history were able to convince so many that they won their party’s nomination?
It’s a very difficult question, and it’s very complicated, and I think it’s different in each party. I think, in the Republican Party, nobody took Trump seriously, and by the time they took him seriously, it was too late. I also think he was very clever in terms of being an insurgent, opposing the establishment, and he reinforced that by shooting from the hip all the time. People actually began to like him saying the crazy things he said. He tapped into fear of terrorism. He tapped into prejudice against immigrants and linked those two together. He tapped into anger that people have because they’re paying taxes that are too high. They’re frustrated with government regulation, and the government isn’t accomplishing its aims. We’re stuck in a couple of wars that should have been over a long time ago, and so he was able to do that. On the Democratic side, I think it was simply a result of having a very small pool of candidates. Hillary Clinton very cleverly over time had inherited her husband’s organizations and extended it, so even if you had more candidates it was very hard to beat that. She was the inside candidate, she was organized, she had everything ready to go, she was kind of what Nixon was in 1968 on the Republican side. But there still wasn’t somebody who came in as a charismatic candidate that could beat her.
Which candidate would you say had your strongest support this year?
My favorite candidate was John Kasich because he was a good congressman. He had worked with Bill Clinton to balance the budget, so he knows how Washington works. He had become governor of Ohio, was a very popular governor of Ohio. [He] reduced the deficit in Ohio and grew jobs in a state that’s normally considered a Rust Belt state. And I think he’s a true conservative, an authentic conservative. He really has the kind of compassionate conservative values that Ronald Reagan had.
Why do you think that Trump’s angry rhetoric has been able to attract supporters?
Because people are angry. Part of the anger is the fault of the Tea Party, because the Tea Party, when they began running candidates in 2010, they made these promises that they know they couldn’t keep. And then people were frustrated, ‘Why didn’t you balance the budget?’ Well you can’t balance the budget. You can reduce the deficit, but you can’t balance the budget when you’re at war. It’s a very difficult thing to do. ‘And we’re going to do X, Y and Z,’ and then X, Y and Z doesn’t happen, and then these people got very angry. So they were disappointed not only with the Democrats but with the Republicans. Trump tapped into that, and they’re ready to throw the system under the bus and start all over again.
Did you see anything different rhetorically at the recent debates?
The consistent thing was in the first presidential debate, Trump interrupted, commented when it was not his time to speak, and all of sudden Tim Kaine took that to another level of rude, interrupting and annoying comments overriding even the moderator in the vice presidential debate. We had seen a little earlier, there was a Republican debate I remember when the Republican debate began going after the moderators … those people looked pretty bad.
What issues do you feel aren’t getting enough attention this election?
We needed to spend more time on the Syrian crisis and what people would do about it. Nobody seems to have an answer. They can criticize everything, but it’s a very complicated situation. There’s at least four different groups involved, and the Russians have to be worked with, so that has to be looked at. I think the environment has been ignored pretty much in the campaign, and I think that’s unfortunate because climate change is affecting us. The crisis is just getting worse until we do something about it. There’s those issues and what should be the proper tax structure.
What issues do you feel got too much attention this election?
I think personalities have gotten too much attention. I think it’s legitimate to talk about somebody’s character and their leadership abilities, but when you get into personal lives, lifestyles, clothing and that kind of thing, we’re off the mark.
What rhetorical suggestions would you give to Trump or Clinton’s campaigns?
The Trump campaign needs to get him on substance. It needs to get him to use more statistics. If you look at the first debate in the first 30 minutes, that’s what he was doing. He had the whole Mexican tax differential on trade at 16 percent, that’s the kind of thing he wants to do ,and talking about it makes him look what he knows what he’s talking about and it makes him presidential, but then he ran out of facts and ammunition. He’s not preparing properly. He needs to be able to prepare more, and he needs to be able to sustain himself for 90 minutes, and I don’t think he can do it.
Hillary Clinton needs to be more emotive, needs to show more empathy and be less robotic. She’s almost overly prepared. One doesn’t get the feeling that anything she says is spontaneous.
If you could have any politician dead or alive compete against Trump or Clinton who would you pick?
John Kasich on the Republican side. I actually think Governor [Martin] O’Malley of Maryland was a very good candidate. He just didn’t catch on for some reason, and that’s unfortunate. If I happened to be a liberal Democrat, I would really like Elizabeth Warren to be my candidate. I think she’s a brilliant debater, superbly educated and very sincere and a really good speaker.
Being a First Amendment scholar, how do you feel about the current argument over content warning and safe spaces?
When I teach my course in freedom of expression, I make clear that the course is going to cover obscenity law and examples are going to have be given of what obscenity is. And because obscenity is illegal, or the sale of obscenity is illegal, I warn the class that if you don’t think you can look at that material or you don’t wanna hear about it, you may not want to take the course or you may wanna sign-in for an alternate assignment. So what I’m saying is if it’s a flagrant kind of thing that might offend the student, I feel an obligation in the classroom to warn that that’s what’s coming.
But people have gotten into these microaggressions, and it’s part of the political correctness group. The fact is almost anything is going to offend someone, and if I’m going to be held accountable for every time a student gets offended for something in the classroom, the classroom is going to come to a complete halt. So there needs to be some real care taken with this. It really needs to be kind of an egregious thing you’re going to look at. What most people don’t understand is students and professors don’t have First Amendment rights in the classroom. They have the right to academic freedom, and that’s to discuss anything in the syllabus. But if you get off the syllabus and start talking about something else, or if students start interrupting, the classroom they can be ejected. Professors have been fired for going off their syllabi and discussing political things in a biology course.
How do you feel about Trump’s proposed changes to libel law?
I think he’s wrong about that. The libel laws have been clearly spelled out. We’ve got case after case, starting with [New York Times Co. v.] Sullivan, that spell out what is libel and what is slander and what a public person is. Those have evolved over time, and there’s a burden of proof that people have, and it should be there if you’re a public figure because the press is the estate that guards us against corruption. And sometimes mistakes are going to be made because reports have to be filed. It’s almost instant history, and we have to allow for some of those mistakes as long as they are not made with malice and not willful disregard for the truth.
Trump just hasn’t look at the case law out there, I don’t think, to see what could happen. I think this is a case of Donald Trump not liking what reporters have said about him and his investments and his businesses, and so he wants to punish them by making it easier for people to sue the media, but it shouldn’t be easy to sue the media.
So, who do you think is going to win the election at this point?
I think Clinton’s going to win the election simply because Donald Trump has blown it. She’s not popular. She’s not liked. If the Republicans simply played over and over again FBI Director Comey’s statement, you can see that 14 minutes into the 15 minutes, so you think he is going to say ‘and therefore I’m asking for an indictment,’ and then he doesn’t. It was a brutal indictment of her, and she could have been defeated on that alone. There’s other problems with her foreign policy, her flip-flop on trade, [and] she’s just not a very charismatic person. But Trump is such a wild card and so crazy that he just has blown it. When it comes to voting for president in the end, people know the president has an enormous amount of power. There’s the nuclear power, there’s foreign policy, [and] there’s all kinds of domestic executive orders that can be issued … I think, when people go into the polls, they’re just going to remember his debate performances and some of his other performances and say he’s just too off the wall to be president.