I Respect John McCain's Incredible Service To Our Nation

OK, so I missed McCain's speech (more on that later), but I'm catching snippets here and there and reading the reports, and it looks to me that he ate it.

Of course, the guy's not known for oratory, so I wonder why they made it 53 minutes long. I guess that his main message was that the whole country must come together in the spirit of bipartisanship and line up behind every single conservative policy that the Bush Administration has rammed down our throats for the past eight years. But that doesn't make it a bad speech. I think the wooden delivery, the fact that they used that stupid screen so that the subject at the podium was behind a solid color almost all of the time (yes, we had more lime green Jello to watch tonight), and the lack of passion had something to do with it.

Jeffrey Toobin called it "the worst speech by a nominee that I’ve heard since Jimmy Carter in 1980." Michael Gerson, Bush's speechwriter ferchrissakes, said it was "a missed opportunity. Many Americans needed to hear from this speech something they have never heard from Republicans before. And in reality, a lot of the policy they’ve heard from Republicans before." The reviews aren't glowing.

And Tom Ridge calling him John Bush doesn't help.



For three days, the Republicans hid the top of their ticket and talked in abstractions about some brave warrior king, Sgt. Rock or something, and then the real guy walked out tonight and offered the exact same policies as the past eight years. I think Matt Stoller is absolutely dead on.

If I'm a Republican, I'm really annoyed that Palin isn't running for President. McCain's speech was not nearly as good or as interesting as Palin's, and he's an awkward speaker. The loudest applause came from his references to her.

...oh, and I guess there was a completely gratuitous 9-11 reference, on video no less. Nice exploitation.



...two things I noticed from the earlier part of the program. Tom Ridge told a story about how he visited McCain at a low point in the primary campaign, and asked him how he was doing, and McCain said "I've been through worse." Amazing that he plays the POW card in private, too. Then, in Cindy McCain's campaign video, they tell the story of how the two met, at a party in Hawaii. They seem to have forgot the part about John being married at the time.