 So ... um ... I guess picking Sarah Palin wasn't a sign John McCain is going senile after all... last night's speech by the official Republican Nominee, having finally gotten that part of "the prize," got up on that catwalk and delivered 40 minutes of non-stop dull. And I mean DULL. Oh lord, it was dull. (It was so bad and so conventional, even Washington Sketchy couldn't shill for it.) And it didn't play well in the room -- not just because it was dull, but because after Wednesday's Democrat-bash-fest, McCain made a pledge to be everybody's best friend. His delegates, who if we're to be honest are really Sarah Palin's delegates, just stared at him like he was a crazy old man. These people beat down Democrats and ram balled up legislative write-ups into their mouths, they don't work with them...
Only the parts of the speech that touched on McCain's captivity in Vietnam were moving -- and those didn't come until the end, and haven't we heard enough about the POW thing already? Worse, he praised HIMSELF as a maverick and as a war hero. Not good. As for the rest? Pfthwaaaack! Bad writing, bad deliverty, robotic stare into teleprompter ... blah!!! What is he going to do for the country? What are his policy goals? And how does anything he promised: low taxes, "winning the war," "drill, drill, drill" ... how does any of that differ from what the Republicans have been offering for the last 12 years? In two words: it doesn't.
The crowd in the Xcel Center got all hopped up on partisan red meat from the Evangelical Queen and her evil henchmen, Rudy and Mitty, and then their supposed "King" feeds them mash. And the television audience that had been so jarred by the onstage and (really scary sounding) bellicose crowd on Wednesday -- all that was missing were pitchforks, fire, and WANTED posters of every Democrat in America -- we're supposed to believe that this same Republican Party, led by a guy who tells them he doesn't even work for them (he works for YOU...) is going to work across the aisle, just because Grandpa tells them to? Yeah, good luck with that.
Earth to Repubs: if McCain wins, your girl Sarah Palin won't be giving the State of the Union addresses, HE will. She won't be doing the daily press brief: HE will. And it won't be Sarah you're seeing on the TV every day ... unless he plans to keep pimping her for the full four years like he's doing in this campaign. In the end, Palin was a good choice in that she makes the ticket not look like a couple of dead white guys. But since she's so inexperienced, don't even think that she'll be advising him on policy, or on anything, folks. She's the apprentice. He's the guy we'd be stuck listening to every day. God forbid...
A great point by Tom Shales in the WaPo this morning:
Apparently the leadership of the Republican Party thinks voters are turned off by specifics, and so Sen. John McCain's acceptance speech as its presidential nominee last night was a hodgepodge of generalities, musings on courage, reminiscence about his years as a POW in Vietnam, and rabble-rousing calls for change. But what would that change entail -- what new programs or policies or ideas? That was left to the audience's imagination. On CNN, Jeffrey Toobin called McCain's address one of the worst convention speeches he'd ever heard. Yet even he had to admit that it was kind of exciting to watch. Maybe McCain understands television better than people think. He used the word "change" at least 10 times in his bombastic speech -- the convention's emotional climax -- but since the Republicans have controlled the White House for the past eight years, what does McCain want to change from? And to? It really is an audacious ploy, to tell people that the country's got to correct the mistakes made by a political party when that's the very party you represent. It's like staging a revolution against yourself -- saying that the Republicans have got to go so the Republicans can move in and clean up the mess.
Meanwhile, Johnathan Capeheart compares Sarah Palin to Eve Harrington: She is the struggling and striving actress who befriended star stage actress Margo Channing and used that association in an aggressive climb to the top of the theater world in the 1950 movie "All About Eve." Anne Baxter played Eve. Bette Davis played Margo. Meanwhile, Michael Gerson (former Bush I speechwriter) panned the speech on MSNBC last night, and again this morning. And in the NYT, "the party in power, running as if it isn't."
The sad state of affairs is that by picking such a red meat conservative who excites the Republican base in a way that he himelf does not, in a very real way, John McCain has become the sidekick in his own campaign.
| Labels: 2008 election, GOP convention, John McCain, presidentail candidates |
