Jay's Notes: Making Speeches Great Again
Summary: Jay’s Notes is a weekly (ish) space where our Executive Director, Jason Mangone, can sling his takes.
There’s a good chance that JD Vance will become my generation’s most important political speechmaker. This isn’t a terribly risky prediction: as of today he’s the most prominent Millennial politician, he became famous on account of his prose, and given the President’s comparative talent for extemporaneous entertainment (this is not a slight—the President is very funny and knows how to get a crowd going), the Trump administration seems keen to feature the young Vice President as its most prominent speechmaker in the more formal, traditional sense of that word.
Over the past week, I’ve thought a lot about speeches and speechmakers.
It started this weekend when we took our kids to DC for a friend’s child’s baptism and used the long weekend to do some sightseeing. Huddled together and staring at the Lincoln Memorial’s south wall, my older three kids actually thought it was cool when I read the Gettysburg Address to them in my best Lincoln voice.1
When we got back in the car where my wife was keeping our sleeping newborn out of the rain (and vigilantly preventing the Parks Police from ticketing our illegally-parked car), I started thinking about the best political speeches I’ve ever witnessed, and immediately recalled President Obama singing “Amazing Grace” ten years ago in Charleston. When he gave that speech in June 2015, I was at home waiting for my wife to go into labor with our first child, where I sat on the couch and wept while watching on CSPAN. Among other things, Obama’s eulogy awakened me to the power of rhetoric.
Our next great orator?
This Monday morning, I watched the speech the Vice President had given at the previous week's AI Summit in France. I didn’t weep. But I did say “Whoa! That was a really good speech!”
Vance’s remarks in Marseille didn’t remind me at all of Obama’s sermon in Charleston, nor am I likely to remember Vance’s words for more than the next couple of days after I write this article. But I did have a sense that, a decade on from Obama’s presidency, there is again an executive who considers language to be his craft, one for which he bears personal responsibility. Each man has apprentices, but the work is of their own hands.
The Vice President’s speech was a good example of what the journalist and venture capitalist Katherine Boyle has recently referred to as the “Strong Form,” which she describes as “wholly authentic and original…The strong form of language, aesthetic and leadership is so rare, it’s jarring to see the counter. To see someone act without a hedge. To see someone say something without a ‘but.’ To see someone go all in without caveats. We’re entering an era where the Strong Form is now prized and on display all the time. It’s going to be jarring to see this way of being in government and business but the good thing is, the strong form becomes infectious once it becomes acceptable to implement.”
Vance summarized his speech in its third paragraph:
“When conferences like this convene to discuss a cutting-edge technology, oftentimes, I think our response is to be too self-conscious, too risk-averse. But never have I encountered a breakthrough in tech that so clearly caused us to do precisely the opposite. Our administration, the Trump administration, believes that AI will have countless revolutionary applications in economic innovation, job creation, national security, health care, free expression, and beyond. And to restrict its development now would not only unfairly benefit incumbents in the space, it would mean paralyzing one of the most promising technologies we have seen in generations.”
More to the point, though, I think the speech was impressive for four reasons:
He exhibited subject mastery of a complex topic while making that mastery accessible to a layperson.
Unlike most policy speeches, his served to reduce uncertainty. If I were trying to start an AI company, I’d have more confidence that the Trump Administration has a solid interest in creating a level playing field. If I were a foreign diplomat, I’d feel as if I had a blueprint to respond to. And so on. He did this by centering the speech around four clear bullet points. Vance has a productive tic of thinking clearly in bullet points, one I like to think he picked up in the Marine Corps.
Whether one agrees with his argument or not, he enforced a tone of optimism while at the same time addressing head-on AI’s risks. This was squarely responsive to Americans’ own perspectives on AI, and also to a core tension in a political coalition that includes both techno-optimists and working class Americans.
Above all, he was jarring and provocative, but in a way that inspired confidence. With Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai seated a just few feet from the dais, the Vice President was unafraid to proclaim that “our laws will keep big tech, little tech, and all other developers on a level playing field.” With most of Europe’s leaders in the audience, he was unafraid to proclaim that, “America wants to partner with all of you, and we want to embark on the AI revolution before us with the spirit of openness and collaboration. But to create that kind of trust, we need international regulatory regimes that foster the creation of AI technology rather than strangle it. And we need our European friends, in particular, to look to this new frontier with optimism rather than trepidation.” And with the world watching he was unafraid to proclaim America’s intention to be the global leader in AI development.
Vance’s style is clearly distinct from Obama’s. He’ll never achieve the transcendent power of Obama’s delivery. The power of Vance’s oratory comes more in his straightforwardness in an era of muddling. He doesn’t yet rank anywhere near our nation’s most memorable speechmakers. But given his youth, fame, power, and command of language, he’s got a better shot than anyone else of getting there.
In the same way we know Obama obsessed over the craft of his own words, my impression of Vance at his best is doing some version of the same. He cares about language. He cares about deeply understanding the things he’s going to talk about. If Obama’s virtuoso performance was helping the country to heal by extemporaneously singing Amazing Grace, he was only able to access such improvisation after a couple decades of reading, engaging in deep conversations with more accomplished writers, and disciplining himself to work late into the night hunched over legal pads.
Or another mediocre showman?
If my generation is incapable of producing our country’s next historically great speechmaker, it may very well be because we’re incapable of creating political leaders with the discipline it takes to write well or read deeply. I know that such discipline fueled Vance’s meteoric rise from working class southern Ohio to his official residence at the Naval Observatory. At his best, I imagine he’s still hunched over legal pads in the Vice President’s study, his own kids learning from the example of hard work.
But at his worst? I imagine him in the White House basement sitting astride Elon Musk on a discarded Reagan-era couch playing Twitter-as-a-videogame.
I understand that, unlike me, Vance is a man in the political arena. As a nonprofit executive, I get to bask in my own integrity, and so long as I’m okay with disappointing a funder or two it’s pretty easy for me to act in complete alignment with my personal values—stated more simply, I don’t have to play politics because I’m not in politics. If moral purity comes relatively easy to a man in my position, making a difference is proportionately more difficult. On the contrary, Vance wouldn’t be a man in the arena unless he were willing to make accommodations for the sake of politics. But because he’s made these accommodations every word he utters—or every Tweet he Tweets—might just change the world.
Like any movement leader, I don’t discount that he must occasionally express anger. Indeed, in its forthright anger, and occasionally in its cruel lies, the Trump/Vance campaign built a broader, more diverse coalition of voters than the Republican party could’ve dreamed of a dozen years ago—a campaign that nearly every group of American voters felt was more aligned with their own priorities than the Harris/Walz ticket.
He's won now. I was hopeful that he’d shift from the Vance who lied about Haitian migrants eating pets and become the polished Vance of the Vice Presidential debate. Less the provocateur that inflames his base and knowingly lies to it, and more the constructive builder of arguments that passionately represents his base and through the force of his rhetoric tries to expand his coalition.
I’m calling on Vance to listen to his own advice. In the speech he gave later on last week at the Munich Security Conference, he admonished the crowd when he proclaimed that:
“I’ve heard a lot already in my conversations—and I’ve had many, many great conversations with many people gathered here in this room—I’ve heard a lot about what you need to defend yourselves from, and, of course, that’s important. But what has seemed a little bit less clear to me and certainly, I think, to many of the citizens of Europe, is what exactly it is that you’re defending yourselves for. What is the positive vision that animates this shared security compact that we all believe is so important?...You need democratic mandates to accomplish anything of value in the coming years. Have we learned nothing, if not that thin mandates produce unstable results?”
If he wants to lead a future Republican party that commands a stable popular mandate—one that has more than a three seat majority in the house, and a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate—he’ll use his generational talent to paint a picture of the future that more Americans want to buy into.
The greatest orators in American history call on us to be better versions of ourselves. If Vance is capable of such greatness, it’ll require him to be the best version of himself—the disciplined guy hunched over books and legal pads, rather than the cruel guy tweeting in the basement.
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Outside of coaching their various teams, I’m not very good at doing things that capture my kids’ attention. So if these seem like an unnecessary three lines that serve little narrative purpose, but allow me fold a humble-brag about my parenting into a Substack post, it absolutely is just that.