Several times during the last eight years, I have found myself in America when Bill Clinton has been delivering his State of the Union address. Always it astounds me. Clinton solemnly pulls out a string of cliches and clumsily-expressed aspirations, delivered with his customary shameless hamminess. Adulation follows.
Always, the performance wrings the standing ovations from the audience, not just at the end but every couple of minutes. Next morning the reviews come in. Across the board, Clinton is hailed as The Great Communicator.
Grown men applauding and shaking their heads in wonder as if Clinton was making music with mere words. Next morning nobody remembers a single phrase. Eight years on and Clinton will be celebrated for one sentence: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman." Whatever good he did will be buried with his bones.
Clinton is the reigning champion at the new shrink-wrapped politics. Minimise the mistakes. Don't get excited.
On C-Span, American television's little oasis of politics and discussion, they devote considerable time to the past. It's another country back there. You see bigger people and hear bigger ideas. Just before Christmas, C-Span showed two speeches which had grown old in the memory but had not diminished in power: Mario Cuomo addressing the Democratic Convention in 1984 in San Francisco and Jesse Jackson doing the same thing four years later.
Jackson's "keep hope alive" speech at the end of his own rainbow campaign was moving but Jesse Jackson could move a bus queue to tears or anger if he wanted.
Cuomo four years previously sang from the same hymn book but the performance was more electrifying. Cuomo has that Chaz Paliminteri heaviness to his features and media stereotyping of Italian Americans has been so effective that you expect him to slap his hands together and say "baddam-boo baddam-bing". Yet Cuomo's angry rejection of Ronald Reagan's shrill but striking claim that his America had become a "shining city on a hill" is one of the last great speeches of our times. It represents an old and sadly missed form of public discourse. "A shining city is perhaps all the President sees from the portico of the White House and from the veranda of his ranch, but there's another city, there's another part of the shining city - the part where some people can't pay their mortgages . . .
"That struggle to live with dignity is the real story of the shining city. And it's a story, ladies and gentlemen, I didn't read in a book or learn in a classroom. I saw it and lived it, like many of you. I watched a small man with thick calluses on both hands work 15 and 16 hours a day. I saw him once literally bleed from the bottoms of his feet, a man who came here uneducated, alone, unable to speak the language, who taught me all I needed to know about faith and hard work by the simple eloquence of his example."
And while he is delivering his words with a passionate poetic rhythm, Cuomo becomes every PR person's nightmare. His face is broody and sweaty, his body-language is all over the place, his emotion has controlled him. He flirts with the possibility of being ridiculed and lampooned for the rest of his life but through honesty and passion rises above it.
Sixteen years later, on late-night television, Mario Cuomo could still make you cry. Nobody would dare make that speech today.
That sort of politics died out at about the time Cuomo declined for the final time to run for president. People had begun to mock his speeches as florid, baroque, too much for our cool ironic times. Today Cuomo, more a relic than an eminence grise of what was once the New Deal left, speaks from the political boneyard of the world he sees around him and despairs of what he calls the New Harshness.
We know the New Harshness in Ireland, too, and we know the New Smallness. Politicians make speeches which, when decoded, may be deemed important, but nobody makes great speeches. What was the last memorable speech you heard? MLK? JFK? Ali?
Of our own? Charles Haughey at the UN? Desmond O'Malley choosing to stand by the Republic? Any Galwayman lifting an All-Ireland trophy? We left the great speakers behind late in the last century. In a world of instant punditry, the big speech carried too much risk.
Tony Blair, with his beaconising and his creepy empathising, evidently fancies that he will be anthologised one day, yet even from the beginning he has seemed formulaic, drawn up by advisers and pitched at the lowest common denominator.
Earl Spencer's words at his sister's funeral drew wide praise, but the sad truth of his own little life and that of his sister ultimately made his words tinny with spite. Dying in a Merc with a playboy while being followed from the Ritz hotel by the media whom she habitually courted is not the stuff of "People's Princesses" (Blair) or "the most hunted woman of her generation" (Earl Spencer).
The current US presidential election is a case study in the smallness malaise. Al Gore nails his sentences together with a carpenter's earnestness. Bill Bradley, who once spoke wonderfully and passionately about the Rodney King beatings, is now a cautious mumbler. George W. Bush is glib to the point that you want to wring his neck.
The quirky little Reform Party begotten of the quirky little Ross Perot has some flair for theatre. Pat Buchanan has a demagogue's rough eloquence, but as the ultimate born-and-reared Washington insider, his speeches about the power of his "peasant army" are so phoney as to be purely comical. Jesse Ventura, the all-wrestling, all-controversial governor of Minnesota, has a way with his hoarse frankness which might yet develop.
Years after his 1984 performance, Mario Cuomo explained the art of the great speech to an interviewer. "If the moment is exactly right and the lights are exactly right and the wine was perfect and the music is perfect and her perfume is perfect when you put your hand on her hand, then you hear violins and you fall in love. If the moment is wrong, well, it's your cold fingers on her sweaty palm."
Cold fingers, sweaty palms? Who cares? We're going to miss the violins.