Palin Power
Sep 4th 2008kencosgroveUncategorized
Wednesday was diversity night at the RNC with the bulk of the warmup speakers coming from minority communities and/or being female. This kind of signalling is important to show these communities that the Republicans are interested in having their business and it doubtlessly hasn’t ever been more important than it is this year. The 2004 Bush campaign made a big effort at broadening the base of the Republican Party, something John McCain acknowledged needed to be done during his short appearance here wednesday night, and this kind of event does go a way toward doing that. Plus, if the McCain campaign can get 5-8% of the vote among some of the minority communities, it might be enough to flip a couple of swing states and win the election.
In addition to introducing Sarah Palin, the point to the third night of the convention was to differentiate the Republican from the Democratic ticket. This was most effectively done by Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee. I’ve never seen Romney give a speech with that much flair and passion and with such a hot message. He’d be a very good candidate if he could be as passionate in his own stump speeches as he was last night. Huckabee was understated and, as is often the case, very effective in sticking the knife into the Obama brand and in explaining why it was ok for people of modest or average means to be Republicans and how the Republicans were the real party of opportunity. He riffed when he went after the media about the Palin kid thing, that was not in the text and it reminded me of a press conference George HW Bush once gave in which he was asked a variety of questions about Dan Quayle with Qualye’s hometown audience booing each more lustily than the last as they resounded over the PA system. Personally, I wouldn’t do this because I think it alienates more people than the schmoozing that GW Bush and McCain have done so succesfully. Ask the Obama folks what happened to their coverage after they flew the press to Chicago on the night that Barry was meeting with Hillary at Diane’s house……
The keynote was Rudy Giuliani who was really solid and played well in the house by talking about experience, taxes and security but I have to wonder how well these issues and his presentation of them played in the country. He did a good job of introducing Sarah Palin as well. Palin did a good job presenting the speech. I have a clear view of the teleprompter and could following along. She only riffed in a couple of places and had trouble making the points of emphasis strongly enough. I know what the points of emphasis are because they are underlined and bolded in the text. She was very good in explaining herself and her family, as well as in selling John McCain. I thought it was a mistake to saying anything about Obama or Biden because there will be time for that but this was her chance to introduce herself to the country. Instead, she did about half of that then attacked Obama at his weakest points. The R’s would be wise to keep hammering on taxes and elitism but also to move off the experience thing because it is too easy to 1) show people that being mayor of a town about half as big as Amesbury, MA in terms of population and a state that has 80,000 people more than does the city of Boston might not be the way to inspire confidence in one’s leadership ability and 2) Obama can flip that back on McCain by suggesting that he’s been in DC for too long and is out of touch. On the other hand, the idea that Barry has no energy policy really, little to no foreign policy experience himself even Biden does, is kinda snobby and wants to tax the snot out of average Americans would play really well with the kinds of voters who will decide the election. Supposedly there is some clip of two Fox commentators inadvertently speaking into a live mic about how bad a pick they thought Palin was and how the R’s are going to lose in two months but I haven’t looked for this yet and can’t vouch for its accuracy.
Oh well, the balloons come down at about 10 PM tonight, the big show ends and the good people of the Twin Cities get their town back in a couple of days. We all finally get to go home and to exit this bubble in which we’ve been living for the past three weeks. I think I can feel ok about missing the sunday morning political shows…..
