Word: speeches
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...seeing John McCain without snark. I suspect his honorable, at times moving, and in some ways remarkable acceptance speech will be judged favorably by the public. It was a reminder of what he had once been as a politician ... and yet it did feel flat after the full-throttle bilge and vitriol of Sarah Palin and Rudy Giuliani the night before. It also seemed more a valedictory than an acceptance speech - more the end of a career than the beginning of a presidency...
...Republican after eight years of scandal and stupidity is to promise a completely different Republican Party. His essential message was right: Washington does have to catch up to the global economy, shake loose the bonds of the special interests and industrial-age bureaucracies. But there was little in this speech that indicated that he had any idea how to do that besides relying on his fierce sense of righteousness. And the Republican Party is what it is: an overwhelmingly Caucasian group of people - 93% of the delegates were white - who cheer more vociferously for tax cuts than they...
...vast middle of the speech - the part after his bracing introduction ("I don't work for a party ... I work for you") and before he told his prison-camp stories - was a halfhearted and unadventurous slog through the world of policy, a vivid demonstration of how little McCain cares about this stuff. It was notable only for the steady stream of misrepresentations of Barack Obama's positions...
...clues are in the text itself. Scully started working on the vice-presidential speech a week ago, before he or anyone else knew who the nominee would be, and it's not hard to pick out the parts that would have been the same regardless of who delivered it. Scully unspooled two centrist themes via Palin that have been key to the McCain message: the idea that the Republican nominee puts service to country ahead of career and the notion that he's the true representative of Middle America. Both themes implicitly push Obama and Biden to the left...
...Once Palin was chosen, Scully tailored the speech to the Alaska governor, highlighting her biography and using her PTA background and local political experience (contrasted so memorably with Obama's work as a community organizer) to bolster his two themes. Where much media attention in the wake of her surprise naming has focused on Palin's views on cultural issues like abortion, the speech carefully steered away from ideological touchstones. Palin was shown as an average mainstream American looking to bring change to Washington, further bolstering McCain's overarching message of reforming the wasteful Federal Government...