Reading the speeches of McCain and Obama has made me ashamed of our political class

Rather less than two years ago, bored and with time to kill at a Conservative party conference, I decided to do what is for a British journalist a rather unusual thing. I decided to read a whole speech, a long speech by a politician, a speech with no particular news value. I decided to read every word.

The full text happened to be lying on my bed. I had taken it from a huge pile left largely untouched on the counter of the Press Office. It was Senator John McCain’s speech to the Tory conference. I knew that it had not caused much of a stir, had said nothing new, and that fellowjournalists had reported it as ponderous, overlong and dull.

So I read it. And it was ponderous, overlong and often dull. Nor did the speech say anything surprising or new. There was nothing there worth remembering for future reference, or quoting to you now, two years later, nor any passage that seemed worth noting down. This was a speech cluttered with heavy furniture.

But it was his. You knew that at once. It had a certain old-fashioned style and respect for language that I admire. And it turned me into a convinced admirer of the Senator that I shall always now be. I finished reading, certain that an honourable and honest man was behind the writing, certain of his strength of mind and will, and certain of his almost abrasive sense of right and wrong.

I suppose the qualities that came through most were an uncompromising nature, and a certain thrilling carelessness whether or not he was keeping his reader with him. There were quaint, somewhat antique turns of speech that any Alastair Campbell would have removed at once; long, convoluted sentences with precarious dependent clauses; and an almost solemnly scholarly tone that reminded me of my dear, self-educated, bookish grandfather. Without being able to say how, I gained from it the strongest sense of a stiff-necked integrity that seemed both refreshing and different, and wholly admirable.

One of the ways that integrity came through, I remember noting, was in a stubborn if subliminal reluctance to overstate his case for the sake of effect; he never picked the easy, vulgar word. And (though I know McCain’s reputation for impatience and sudden anger) an essential intellectual modesty came through: this speaker did not believe and so would not pretend that politics was easy or obvious; that every question had a clear answer; or that his opponents were wicked or stupid. I feel I learnt more about McCain in that quiet 20 minutes with his text in my hotel bedroom than I have since from months of reading news reports and commentaries.

Today I have repeated the experiment. I’ve just read an entire speech by Barack Obama: the Illinois Senator’s recent speech in Philadelphia about race.

In many ways this speech could hardly be more different from Senator McCain’s. Obama’s text is crisp, modern, elegant, moving and stylish. It is also lucid — at times almost painfully so — and very much conceived as an exercise in communication. The speech has been drafted with its audience in mind at every turn, speaking clearly and carefully to the listener, anxious to keep us on board, and to keep our sympathy too.

But, however different, this speech, like McCain’s, comes from the heart and the mind of the man who wrote it. It is his speech, and every word suggests he cares how he expresses himself and respects language. And, like McCain’s, the speech has the confidence never to swagger or stoop; and the courage and intelligence to see and confess that the world, and America, is a complicated and ambivalent thing, and the easy answers often wrong.

Senator Obama’s speech in Philadelphia is nearly 5,000 words long and should really be read in full and at a sitting, for its argument is sequential, gathering force as the text proceeds. You will find it easily on the internet. I shall restrict myself here to quoting his remarks about his church. Obama’s campaign has been embarrassed, and his enemies handed ammunition, by this African–American church, and its retired black pastor’s strident comments about race. The easy thing would have been to dissociate himself in simple terms from all three. Instead, he says this:

‘The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America. ‘And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptised my children...

‘He contains within him the contradictions — the good and the bad — of the community that he has served diligently for so many years... I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.

‘I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother — a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

‘These people are a part of me.’

You may agree on reading this that here is more than mere eloquence and more than mere emotion, however heartfelt. Behind the language lies such an intelligent recognition of the ambiguity of public and private life, and so honest an instinct to risk expressing it, that I shall never be able to think this would-be president a less than admirable person.

And before we British sneer, as is our habit, at the crudities of US politics, maybe we should ask ourselves when we last saw a leading British politician invest such care and honesty — and such risk — in a speech. Turning aside from Senators Obama and McCain I return to Westminster, Blackpool, Bournemouth and Brighton, and the shallow reasoning and moral monochrome of our own political class, with their underlying assumption that a speech is for tonight’s TV clips and tomorrow morning’s newspapers, and nothing more; that thought clad in any permanent record is dangerous; and that the public recognition of ambivalence or complexity is an admission of weakness.

I know next to nothing about US politics, and neither envy nor would try to emulate those journalistic colleagues who can speculate on the likely effect on this or that sector of the American electorate of a would-be presidential candidate’s remarks. I only know the effect of Obama’s and McCain’s speeches on me. They convince me that alongside the cynicism and shallow populism that democratic politics always brings, there can still subsist depth and integrity, and — yes, it matters — discernment and style.

Matthew Parris is a columnist on the Times.