I know I'm not the target audience, but Christ that was boring last night. That might have had something to do with the excitement twins: Thompson and Lieberman. Those two could drop a tweaking meth addict just with a well timed story about the way things used to be. Thompson spoke for what I estimated was 12 hours, recapping every single thing John McCain ever did, then dropping some aside about "That's what the Romans would have wanted in a leader". In case you didn't know, John McCain is a POW. If you didn't know, you probably haven't listened to any McCain speech or any McCain surrogate for the past eight years. Apparently this was the speech Schwarzenegger was supposed to give before he ran and hid and they retooled it for Fred. I would have loved to see Arnold give this 40 minute speech, interspersed with movie quotes of his.
Joe Lieberman did a nice impression of a Democrat. If you had HD, you could see the look in his eyes that said "God, let John McCain win. If Obama takes this the Dems will stop putting up with all my bullshit." And it's true, the second Obama is elected Lieberman is in deep shit, he's gonna have to sandbag Democrats from outside the party now and do so without his committee chairmanships. Who would have thought that Democrats would get mad about you constantly busting on their leaders since the Clinton days once they had the numbers so that you weren't needed? Joe didn't.
George Bush gave his speech from the White House. Depending on which station you watched it on, it was either hamhandedly cut with crowd reaction shots or presented like a normal Presidential speech with no crowd reaction and all these weird pauses Bush made for applause he couldn't know of or hear. According to Brian Williams, that's the way the RNC wanted it and only provided the one Bush feed and the networks were on their own for crowd shots. It was truly weird.
Tonight the woman no one at the RNC knows, but yet has to virulently defend with the same three lines, even as today we learn she has a crazy reverend problem and wasn't interviewed until the day before she was announced: Sarah Palin! Of note, they decided to fly in the guy who knocked up their daughter to come on stage and play happy family. This after days of saying "Don't politicize this". That's nice, maybe they can have the shotgun wedding right before Palin speaks.
To point out the enthusiasm gap between the two parties would be to belabor an obvious point. The RNC convention arena looks twice as big and 1/4 as full. You see large swathes of empty seats and the biggest outbursts of applause look more like a happy PTA meeting than a major political convention. The official speech schedules are still all messed up, with people being cut, added, and dropped all day. The themes have been dumped and it's basically all "A cause greater than self" and "POW".
Speaker
Mittens
The Mittster is going to get up there and subtly remind everyone exactly how boring his personal life was. There would have been no vetting problems with him. No crazy pastors, knocked up kids, secessionist parties, nothing. But noooooooooo! They had to go with the woman. Then he's gonna rage, saying "Darn it!" before moving on to "Goshdarn it!" and walking briskly off stage. Then he'll come back and apologize for flying into a uncontrollable rage.
Rudy 9iu11iani?
They might have moved him to tonight, reports say. Or they dropped him completely. In any event he's still workin' hard and flogging 9/11 to death. Just today he spoke of Sarah Palin and said "I'd be confident that she'd be able to handle [9/11]. She's been a governor of a state, she's been mayor of a city." The man can't help himself, it's a disease.
Speaker
Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison
The woman who actually was qualified to be on the ticket and had a record of some sort. She'll walk up, squint her eyes like Clint Eastwood, sigh, shake her head, and deliver her speech defending Sarah Palin. She's been puttin' paper money in the swear jar lately.
Speaker
Tragic Comedy Superstar, Governor Sarah Palin
To say this is it for the McCain campaign is understating it. If she bombs this speech or even more information comes out where they have to drop her from the ticket, John McCain might as well pull out of the race before tomorrow. She has two People/Us Weekly type magazine covers coming out that both use the phrases "Scandals" and "Lies" over her picture, every hour brings some new bizarre revelation about her or one about her lax vetting, every paper and new broadcast is openly questioning her fitness and McCain's sanity, the campaign is hiding her from the press, and polls show Obama finally moving into the 50% range for the first time against McCain. She has to knock it out of the park just to stop the bleeding.
So no pressure.
No comments:
Post a Comment