Since the post-1968 reforms that led both the Democratic and Republican Parties to use binding caucuses and primaries to choose their presidential nominees, the summer nominating conventions have largely been scripted events whose outcome was rarely in doubt. But Democratic and Republican leaders rightly see the conventions as free advertising, and have often doled out prime speaking slots to politicians who are either considered rising stars or whose supporters were vital to victory. From Democrats Mario Cuomo in 1984 and Barack Obama in 2004 to Republican Pat Buchanan in 1992, ambitious politicians have used their speaking slots either as a springboard to success or as a way to steer their party in a new direction.
Whose speeches made them political celebrities?
By far the most meteoric rise out of a plum speaking spot was an obscure Illinois state legislator named Barack Obama. Obama's keynote speech called for unity across the partisan divide. "There's not a liberal America and a conservative America — there's the United States of America," he said to thunderous applause from the crowd. In 2004, the whole concept of "red" and "blue" states was only a few years old, an outgrowth of the contested 2000 election, and Obama's address spoke to a yearning to transcend that nascent division. It didn't work, of course, but it did catapult him into the Senate and then the presidency in 2008.
Obama followed in the footsteps of another up-and-coming Democrat from 20 years earlier: New York Gov. Mario Cuomo. Cuomo's keynote at the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco electrified the crowd. Democrats, reeling from their 1980 shellacking at the hands of Republican Ronald Reagan, were searching for their footing as New Deal liberalism's appeal was fading. "There is despair, Mr. President, in the faces you don't see, in the places you don't visit in your shining city," Cuomo said, addressing President Reagan. While many Democrats wanted Cuomo to run for the party's presidential nomination in both 1988 and 1992, he never did. President Bill Clinton considered him for a seat on the Supreme Court, which he also declined.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Latest Videos From
Other speakers have been successful in pushing the party in a different direction. That was the case for insurgent "paleoconservative" Pat Buchanan, who had run against incumbent Republican President George H.W. Bush in the 1992 nominating contests. Buchanan said that America was in the midst of a "culture war," that was "as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America." Buchanan's positions on issues like free trade would later be adopted more successfully by Donald Trump.
Intraparty ideological struggles were also the reason for Sen. Elizabeth Warren's 2016 address to the DNC in Philadelphia. Part of the party's progressive wing, Warren was tasked with shoring up support from disappointed supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders, who had lost a bitter primary to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. "Even families who are OK today worry that it could all fall apart tomorrow," she said in a speech focused on inequality and power. She led the 2020 race for the Democratic nomination in 2019, and despite falling short she remains an important figure in the party.
Not all of these decisions worked out. In 1996, Republicans gave their keynote to Rep. Susan Molinari of New York. Just one year later, however, she left her job in Congress to work as a journalist for CBS News. In 2012, Democrats awarded their keynote slot to San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro, who was considered a major political talent. Castro, however, was unlikely to be elected to statewide office in heavily Republican Texas, and despite a cabinet position in the Obama administration, his 2020 run for the Democratic nomination fizzled out quickly.
While there's no way to know for sure, in all likelihood, viewers of the RNC in Milwaukee earlier this month or the DNC in Chicago next month will have watched someone give their breakout speech.
