McCain gave a less than stellar acceptance speech that seemed a compendium of his previous stump speeches. His Vietnam experience is heroic but getting stale. And once again the cable networks were trying to spin this speech as something better than it was. Chris Matthew's was particularly bad. My question which McCain failed to answer in his acceptance speech is “Why in the world should we give four more years to a party that McCain was a part of.” We are just supposed to pretend McCain dropped in from outer space? Ariana Huffington calls McCain’s strategy the “amnesia campaign” and she nailed it. McCain wants us all to forget the last eight years, which is why he never mentioned Bush by name last night. If the media is as “liberal” as the Republican Party would like you to believe, it certainly wasn’t in evidence this week.
You could tell the delegates did not like what they were hearing from McCain. A lot of them were sitting on their hands. McCain had a very poor delivery and stumbled badly at times. Not a good night for him. He doesn't look ready for prime time. A former speechwriter for Bush thought McCain missed an opportunity to show how he would be different: there was no substance. CNN’s speech analyst called it the worst acceptance speech since the 1980 Carter speech.
Sarah Palin was the convention surprise. Her conservative credentials as Mayor of Wissalia Alaska, and Governor of Alaska were known to the base of the party but not to the country. Obviously she was not McCain’s first choice, Lieberman was, but McCain lucked out since she is an appealing presence. Of course that is great for him but bad for the country. And it makes him look hypocritical since he told all of us his primary criteria for selection of a vice president was fitness to be commander-in-chief from day one. McCain is also vulnerable to negative information coming out about her, since the vetting process on her was superficial at best. His judgement on this issue must be called into question. The Republican’s attempted to ameliorate this by spinning her resume to make it less thin and by attacking the media if they attempted to find out more about Palin’s experience and background. Accusing the media of sexism is a problem when they found no objections to the media’s sexist treatment of Hillary Clinton, going so far as to call her a “whiner”. This comment was made by Sarah Palin.
The other convention speakers had a lot of vitriol to spew out to the audience and us at home but they were light on how they were going to help the American people. Rudy Giuliani and Lindsey Graham, were downright nasty. What was especially disturbing were the disparaging comments made about community organizers who play a vital role in representing the disadvantaged against the big city bureaucracies. Republican’s should know better than anyone the value of all work in our society. It makes them look like they only care about you if you work for a hedge fund. Lindsey Graham also needs to be more careful how he tries to position the Democratic ticket as somehow unpatriotic, because they opposed the Iraq war, and want more focus put on capturing Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan. These are legitimate viewpoints and represent democracy in action.
Joe Lieberman’s speech was a major disappointment since eight years ago he was the Democratic Party vice president candidate. His hawkish views and cheerleading on the run-up to the Iraq war have blinded him to the reality that the Iraq War was a major foreign policy blunder second only to the Vietnam War. More effort by Democrats to help elect Ned Lamont would have nice, so Joe Lieberman could have enjoyed retirement.
Lastly, today there was a newspaper article comparing Republican and Democratic party delegate ethnic breakdowns. Those of you who watched both conventions will not be surprised by the Republican delegates were overwhelmingly white (93%) and male (68%) versus the Democratic delegates who were 65% white and 51% male. Blacks made up 23% of the Democratic Party delegates and 2% of the Republican Party delegates. Black Republican delegates were actually lower than four years ago when they represented 7% of the delegates. So you know who the party of diversity is.
