Palin's Speech:
A speech is just a speech, of course. And no doubt your take on the speech depends on your political views. But I thought Palin was a natural tonight: She was as good as Obama can be, and I think that's pretty damn good.
Related Posts (on one page):
- McCain's moment:
- Palin's big moment:
- Palin's Speech:
As I said in an email to some grad school buddies who post to each other on politics and so on, we still need to see her in interviews. Debates? Not too much of a worry: She'll only be debating Biden, and he's not superior as a debater. (My pick for best debater on either side is Dodd. Amazes me that I ended up thinking that . . . But what can I say.)
She can do the speeches. And she'll probably have a debate which will go fine.
So I'm gonna wait until I see her on MTP and This Week before coming to any final conclusions.
But as to speechifying: Palin is as good as anyone out there now.
Check my post on the previous thread. I actually know WHO wrote the speech, and have read his book.
Now go away, you pissy little man. I have to shamble around an abandonned farm house and eat some brains.
Does your mommy know you're up this late?
That's not Anti-Pork I can believe in.
Wish I'd have said that.
Where have we heard something like this before? Oh yeah: "McCain heard the questions in advance."
You don't make excuses when you win.
Be civil or daddy will cut off the comment thread.
Certainly though, she is a very appealing speaker.
(You may feel free to cut out the adjective that I used to describe the person who described me as a zombie, and which I got from my Irish grandma. But please leave in the 'shambling around the farmhouse bit': I kinda liked that one. And I'm contract faculty, so I don't get much pleasure in life.)
One thought on the substance: Including an extended discussion of international energy markets was quite shrewd. It allowed her to play to one of her strengths -- energy policy -- while simultaneously undercutting concerns about her lack of foreign policy experience.
JHA
JHA
BUT what was clever was using the energy issue, about which she clearly knows somthing, as a Bridge to Elsewhere. If I may put it like that. Quite shrewd. She went into the Caspian Basin/Venezuela/Persian Gulf without it sounding like a reach that way. Without sounding like she was trying to establish her credibility on foreign policy. Good idea for a segue.
"Do any of you zombies know that she didn't actually write the speech herself?"
Very few politicians write their speeches. FDR had an army of speech writers. This is not the time of Lincoln. Do you think Clinton wrote his speeches, or Hillary? JFK had his speeches written for him, and probably his book Profiles in Courage was ghosted by Sorenson.
As I said in my prior post, my contact deep inside the Obama campaign says that BHO actually does write his speeches. In my opinion, this is much to his credit. However, I will not vote for him as I think he would be a menace to the republic. Nor will I vote for McCain.
In any case your comment is juvenile.
She could have done without McCain’s little cameo at the end, though. For that matter, so could have McCain. I'd hazard that by now more than a few folks in the Xcel Energy Center are secretly wishing their party's ticket were reversed.
You don't make excuses when you win.
Bingo. The left is running scared. More thug tactics tomorrow, I predict. But they'll be sleeping uneasy tonight. Ha. Serves them right.
Koho
Her voice is a bit grating but that is not her fault. She can deliver really great lines and sound so nice. More importantly, she can be funny. That is what she has over Obama. Obama can sound nice but he is totally earnest and humorless. She woman is funny. Reagan was funny. Humor and sarcasm are incredibly effective when you can do it and still look nice.
Mrs. Rove would be a lucky woman then, wouldn't she?
You may be right. But at that point, the whole "experience" issue would enter the 27th dimension of counter-counter-spin.
Did Obama also instruct his minions to call the rest of us "zombies"? Because that is VERY INSENSITIVE.
We are the 'ontologically challenged,' Senator Obama. And we VOTE! (You're a Cook County Democrat. You KNOW how much the undead vote has helped your party in the past!)
She has the raw political talent of a Clinton or a Reagan. She has exactly the right message. She handled the foreign policy part of her speech well. This wasn't a substantive speech (and it should not have been), but it was a speech that will resonate with Middle America in a way that Obama never can.
She will resonate with Middle America because she's one of us. She has a singular gift for connecting with her audience.
I was expecting her to do OK. This was so much more than OK, this was a home run. She cut Obama down to size and painted a compelling political narrative for McCain. That's exactly what she needed to do, and she did it like no one else could have.
I can't stand Palin's brand of phony populism, so I hated the speech, but she delevered it extremely well. The price of "Palin to withdraw as VP" contracts at intrade have halved, so she must have done a very good job.
Of course the fact that she's only be in office for a little over a year and a half isn't relevant as long as your comment sounds truthy.
No kidding. Of course we knew that she didn't write the entire speech. That's why they have speechwriters! Does anything think Biden wrote any of his (at least the ones that weren't plagiarized)? Or Clinton? Or even Obama?
This is the lamest, most pathetic complaint I've heard yet from the left. If this is all they have, they're dead in the water. DEAD. And there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth.
I'll take that bet. I'm eager to see all the "progressives" rally around the domestic abuser who tasered a 10-year-old and threatened to kill his father-in-law - oh, and who was a cop who drank on duty. Mike Wooten: poster child of the American left.
That speech can be kindly described as "scrappy" at best.
First female president?
No.
The speech itself was good for the red meat, but there wasn't much substance to it. However, where I think Palin has got some serious talent is in her delivery of attack lines. Very, very effective. Much more so than Rudy in fact, because while his delivery was good for the base, I think it was too over-the-top and mean-spirited seaming for the average viewer at home. But the way Palin delivered the insults with a smile and almost friendly demeanor was potentially convincing to undecideds. Very good job.
Now, the fun question is: Did she just upstage McCain? I know how I'm betting...
-Rick Davis
Well, that was perfectly obvious tonight. The speech was well delivered and should bring in some cash for McCain, but as for bringing over the undecideds? Not so sure. I think Johnny Lunchbucket in Ohio is a bit more concerned about his paycheck than a snarky comment about a fake presidential seal that 90% of the undecideds probably never heard of.
It also seemed like they were running against Obama from a month ago, before he outlined specific plans to match his vague "hope" and "change" statements earlier in the election.
You are aware of who the current VP is, right? If McCain wins, I look forward to further expansion of the Executive's self-arrogated authority to decide who's a terrorist, and what rights such people do or do not have.
Pathetic troll. Bitter, angry.
mrestko: Yeah. Agreed. Worst line of the speech. Sounded like something Giuliani could have said and perhaps sounded like he was joking. But it wasn't a high point of the speech, for damn sure.
Ah so you admit Obama's entire campaign is predicated on promising all the goodies to everyone. That Palin refuses to play that game is a problem?
Well, I should be gentle with you now. Palin just ruined your fall, didn't she?
To the left's surprise, she's not Dan Quayle. I don't think the left will be able to label her quite as easily.
Jann Carl? Carrie Nation? Patricia Heaton? Work with me, people...
And do watch the Alaska governor debate that was posted earlier today here on Volokh. I don't agree with all of her positions, but she is definitely no dummy.
She certainly did a good job, if you can stand the mockery and belittling.
So the election IS a journey of personal discovery for Obama? Well, at least you admit it.
You assume she was talking about people in the United States. I figured she was talking about terrorists overseas. Treating terrorists abroad as enemies rather than suspects has a lot more tradition behind it than treating them as criminal suspects.
But did you see the video in which they asked Sarah Palin who her favorite Supreme Court Justice was, and she answered Anthony Kennedy?
The video is here.
No, I am aware of the non-partisan temptations of executive power, and frankly have no faith in McCain's ability to resist them. He has not been consistent on much else in his career or his campaign, and strikes me mostly as a cranky old man bored out of his mind by anything other than the American military, with the possibly exception of immigration policy. (Incidentally, should he be elected I doubt Obama would do much to roll back some of the expanded powers of the past eight years, either, especially with respect to surveillance.)
Well, I should be gentle with you now. Palin just ruined your fall, didn't she?
As a matter of fact, I don't even have a vote in your election. But you're having a good time gloating, so please don't let me get in your way.
I am way off topic here, but what do you think about this mob turns on cops YouTube video?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ws-mn3M23dc
No, I didn't know that! Damn. I ain't votin' for any politician that doesn't write his or her own speech!!!
Thanks a gob for letting me know this. What a horrible mistake I would have made.
We have two great orators emerging from this election: Palin and Obama. If I were managing a debating contest, I would match them against each other and let McCain debate Biden.
Palin dominates this election campaign. All eyes are on her, more than on the other contestants, who are in danger of being ignored by the free media. Even her opponents are paying most of their attention to her, to the neglect of their own candidates. My estimate of the value of the lady for free media is now increased to $1 billion.
Or do you mean Walt Monegan, the former Anchorage police chief who resisted Palin's pressure (direct and indirect) in 2007 to fire Wooten for these previously adjudicated infractions?
Wait -- you must mean the 12 state senators, representing both parties, who voted unanimously on July 28, 2008 to launch an investigation into Palin's apparent abuse of power in dismissing Monegan over the Wooten matter?
Either Alaska is crawling with "progressives," or maybe Troopergate -- and Palin's imminent subpoena now that she's flip-flopped on cooperating with the investigation -- is more about questioning abuse of power and not so much about rallying around the target of Palin's vendetta.
Still, I find the sarcasm a bit off-putting. I really don't like the disparaging comments about Obama's record. And I similarly won't like disparaging comments about being a small town mayor. I thought the same thing about Fred Thompson's speech. It went into details about McCain's POW experiences that I was not aware of, and I wound up with an even greater respect for the man. But a couple gratitous snarky comments were kind of jarring. The "we hear a lot about hope these days (hah! take that Barack!)" kind of thing. "Red meat" seems to be the phrase du jour, and I'll take it to mean this: never stick to the high road when you have a microphone and can be an insult comic. McCain works better as a high road guy (same for Obama -- that line about McCain not being willing to follow Osama bin Laden to the cave he's hiding in was a similar clunker), and I imagine that's what we'll see from McCain tomorrow.
She had the cadence of a 10th grade student reciting a rehearsed presentation. Odd pauses and a pitch that at times sounded oddly strained.
She was unable to generate momentum toward the end of the speech, it sort of fizzled ... ran out of gas ... as she gazed through her specs and tried for the appearance of gravitas. Embarrassingly sub-par and full of the right wing claptrap that is guaranteed to drive America further toward unilateralism and greater isolation.
Compared to any speech you care to name at the Democratic convention, this was strictly amateur night.
The idea of this ingenue sitting in the VP's office is really a bad joke. Americans deserve better. Comments on this thread that find greatness in this sub-par effort make you realize how short America is of politicians of genuine stature and how ready some people are to grasp at straws.
As IF!
What's underneath is the devastating part. Us conservatives have been pounding Obama for months about his lack of experience, but we never really laid it out in a plain, stark form.
She did that. Is there any doubt now that Obama is an air candidate? The line about him writing two books and not a single piece of legislation. THAT IS DEVASTATING TO OBAMA.
The emperor has no clothes!!!!
I went to message board after message board the second this speech was finished. Conservatives are asking liberals what Obama has accomplished. And you know what? The only answer the conservatives are getting is brutal personal attacks.
Obama and Biden should be afraid. Be very afraid.
I think the new anti-media/anti-Obama/anti-"elites"/anti-Washington tack is going to backfire. McCain was doing well with the experience/steady hand theme and I think they are swimming against historical trends:
1) Small Town Focus. GWB won in 2004 by turning the suburbs red, and I think the "everybody who doesn't live in a small town isn't an American" vibe is damaging there.
2) Running against Washington? Doesn't this play a bit into the Obama camp's ability to point out that, um, Republicans controlled all the branches of government for most of the last 8 years?
3) Culture war. I think McCain's crossover appeal came from his ability to not seem partisan or classless even when twisting the knife. Oops. Bye bye post-partisan voters.
Maybe McCain will pivot back to reform and maverick now that the base is frenzied, but Palin no longer gets to whine about press coverage after coming out so nastily and using her children as political props. The "bulldog" doesn't get to complain about the press.
And SHE DIDN'T WRITE HER OWN SPEECH. ZOMG
Mommy, mommy, Sarah hit me!
"Yes Barry, but you're supposed to be older, more mature, and more responsible than her. Too bad you're not"
In other news, Dexter wants to ask Sarah Palin how to kill so many people in primetime on every channel and yet no one notices. Moose stew is democratic people, man!
It real. You may not like it, but its real enough.
"Comments on this thread that find greatness in this sub-par effort make you realize how short America is of politicians of genuine stature and how ready some people are to grasp at straws."
As Orwell advised, keep your metaphors visual, and don't use them if the picture is wrong. Case in point: We ain't "grasping at straws," 'cause we ain't drowning.
Not now no way no how.
To be sure, first impressions are important, especially with only 60 days for voters to decide. How will she do when not delivering a prepared speech, though? I think she's lucky Tim Russert isn't still around.
"So the election IS a journey of personal discovery for Obama? Well, at least you admit it."
There is a strategic structure to Obama's campaign, whether you choose to recognize it or not.
It definitely started with vague proclamations of "hope" and such. That worked, getting Obama one of the largest volunteer organizations and an enormous sum of donations. Finally, last week he shifted into actually outlining the specific ways he plans to deliver some of his vague promises.
The polls show that this shift worked as well. He got the typical convention bump even with the atypical VP announcement the day after his speech. If you look deeper into the recent polls, you see an even bigger jump towards Obama on questions like "Is he ready to lead" and "Who is better for the economy?"
What the Republicans need to do the next 2 months is not only tear down Obama, but convince the undecideds to sign on to their platform. I think their biggest mistake is assuming the undecideds will vote for someone, when realistically if they are unhappy with both candidates they won't vote at all.
This convention has been heavy on vitriol and non-issue oriented attacks so far which should be great for fundraising, but isn't likely to convince an unemployed steel worker to sign up for the as of yet undefined Republican plan to rejuvenate America.
You know, Obama talks about his family in his speechs, and brings them on stage with him as well. So can we start trashing his kids now too?
Not us, you. She's a cultural conservative and I've said from day one that her reason for being on the ticket is to connect with and energize that group. She's accomplished that. But the idea that everyone in Middle America (yes, I live there unlike the hacks at the National Review who live in Fairfax or McLean or wherever it is that they lecture us Midwesterners about how we think) are ready to jump onto her bandwagon is off base. There's plenty about her views that's going to scare of the middle of the electorate once they hear more about her ideas and past actions (moderates don't tend to like book banners and creationists).
If you're right--and I never try to predict these things--then how has the GOP gone wrong with this convention, or the choice of Palin? If the undecideds will stay home, isn't energizing Republicans the key to victory?
WOW!
She even won over mac?!
WHAT A SPEECH!
You're right, my understanding is he didn't even write his own books. They were ghostwritten.
And Obama's children are fair game now too, huh? They were on stage also.
The left must really hate kids. I guess it goes in tandem with their love of abortion and infanticide. They can't wait to condemn anyone who's pregnant and having kids as "punished with a baby." It doesn't help you at all that the one blogger pushing this crap the most is a homosexual man who will never know anything about motherhood.
It may well be that Palin connects more with cultural conservatives than with Middle America. But don't dismiss her appeal completely, Chris Matthews made thought she came off very well in her appeal to Middle America, that her pitch was natural and unforced. Chris Matthews isn't exactly unbiased either in his open adoration of Obama.
So you are from here (points to the middle) and your concern with the media is that *National Review*(!) gets us wrong?
Seriously? THAT'S your complaint about the national media? NR gives the wrong picture of us?!!
I just find that so odd. Are you SURE you're really in flyover territory? I mean, Maureen Dowd just called Indiana "the West." So I've lost my sense of geography. Perhaps I'm not the only one?
I think the dems are in for a big surprise in nov. 45% of the electorate is non-african american women, versus 9% or so of the electorate being african-american. the pollsters may find their polls don't capture women voters pulling that lever all alone in that polling booth for the first african-american president or pulling it for the first women vice-president. Tonight went a long way for the latter.
And the behavior of the legacy media is appalling, including ms. couric, who cannot miss how appalling she is being. Do the male members of the legacy media and the dem establishment understand how many women around them got pregnant when they wish they hadn't and then solved the issue in a way they find unhappy? amazing. Perhaps the tin foil hatters can spin that Bristol got preggers as part of the plan (and is there a more embarrassed 17 year old girl on the planet?).
Do the dems not understand what's happening to them?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/03/AR2008090301176.html
I'm a bit jaded to find out that McCain had the VP speech prepared well before they even knew who the VP was. Palin might have made a great speech, but I'm highly speculative that she wrote anything but small parts to personalize it for her. It's still bothersome that she is simply towing the lifeline McCain has given her. I'm only convinced of two things after her speech: 1. that McCain has decent speech writers. 2. that Palin can animate someone elses words to an impressive level. That said, it's hard to believe Republicans say they are so out of tune with Hollywood.
Ablity to make a good speech or do interviews well simply does not make up for the long list of problematic issues that have been brought up against her.
——————-
After writing the above, I've gone and re-read her statements. Really, she addresses nothing of substance accept that "democrats want to raise taxes" without her saying anything about how she is supportive of lowering taxes. Saying that 'raising taxes' is bad is nothing more than the most sophomoric attmept at trying to illustrate one understands free market capitalism or economics. This of course was not a suprise given that McCain himself has said essentially that he does not understand it as well.
She failed to mention anything about immigration issues and border protection as essential to national security. Also torublesome.
I could list quite a few other problems I found with the content of her speech, but the most important one is that she simply said why the democrats are 'bad' without actually articulating why we should support her or McCain without resorting to the typical, "he's a maverick" and "he's courageous" arguments. Courage is not something a president will ever need to demonstrate. Reason, however, is.
9/10 on delivery, 2/10 on substance. Appealing to emotions is so catastrophically contagious these days...
I don't think so, at least not in 2008. The difference between registered Democrats and Republicans has widened significantly since 2004. It's also important to keep in mind that if the election is tomorrow and the undecideds stay home, Obama wins.
This could all be moot if McCain comes out tomorrow and lays out a brilliant platform that he sells to unemployed America. That's what is really missing from this convention. Conservatives are excited and if you stay within the right wing echosphere it might seem like everybody likes Palin. However, that excitement hasn't translated even to moderates and if it doesn't, McCain loses the election.
This article lays out the argument well:
please save "the AP is the liberal MSM" garbage
On another note, the Republican strategy seems to me to be pretty sharp lately. They reveal the VP pick the day after the Dems convention, to steal some thunder, and then they leak some minor controversy to take the rest. I'm a bit suspicious that anyone connected with the Obama camp actually publicly criticized her family life. I think it all worked out well for McCain.
But a lot of the attacks were unfair and (as usual) represent a skewed perspective of the other side. Things are going to get interesting.
It's well known that you can't get invited to the best left-wing shindigs unless you have forced someone to have an abortion, or enthusiastically signed up for a few yourself. But fewer people know that Andrew Sullivan sprang fully-formed from his gay dad's forehead, hence his lack of knowledge of motherhood.
I'm almost of the opinion that she's a puppet for McCain. I'm really looking forward to seeing what she will say in the debates. I'm 'hoping' (fingers crossed) that it will be something more than the typical campaign rhetoric of "evil terrorists this" and "businesses are good".