One word description — UNINSPIRING.
If there was something meaningful in those 60 minutes or so of rambling, monotone yawner, I didn’t hear it.
Someday, many years from today, folks are going to look back to tonite and say; that was one of the worst acceptance speeches ever.:o
I remember hearing one good line I really liked (really). Forgot what it was though (also really). Guess it got lost in the mediocrity.
I have Obama’s speech still on Tivo. I turned it on and watched 5 minutes to get my brain engaged again.
This performance reminded me of Bob Dole, which probably isn’t a good thing for McCain.
Linky??,…I had to take a break after last night but I’ll watch the reruns.
I actually thought it was a good speech for independents. He appeared sincere, mature, and thoughtful. It would make me want to vote for him if it wasn’t for the disagreeing with everything on his platform thing. He did manage to avoid any details of his plan for saving America. He sure is patriotic, although I wonder why he didn’t wear a flag pin.
I was so moved by it, I made a $50 campaign donation.
To Obama.
It’s hard to say whether the delivery was the worst part of it, or the disjointed aspect of it, or whether the sheer brass ballsiness for McCain to call for change, demanding that we throw the bums out.
As Jon Stewart said to Mike Huckabee, “So, you feel that your party is best suited to fix all the damage your party caused?”
I just don’t think Palin or McCain did anything that will make the Obama campaign break stride. In fact, with tonight’s performance, it will be fairly easy for Obama to point out how truly odd it is for McCain to be calling out the Republicans. They’re already talking about McCain having walked in lockstep with Bush. There just isn’t a lick of retooling that they have to do.
When they start hammering on facts like McCain singled out Palin three times for wasteful pork projects, McCain’s call to make the names of big pork politicians known will ring pretty hollow. When he said that line, and they cut to a McCain/Palin placard, I said “There’s one right there.”
CNN has posted excerpts and the full transcript. Of course it’ll all be on YouTube within a couple of hours.
One quote: “Nothing brings greater happiness in life than to serve a cause greater than yourself.” Unless it’s as community organizer of course; those we know from Guiuliani and Palin are just lame, a dichotomy which I’m hoping Obama will note (the GOP smirking at which is especially galling after he’s been called an elitist so many times).
He frequently said “Fight with me! Fight with me!” but it didn’t appear anybody took him up on the challenge. A pity, because I’m guessing several could have whipped his butt.
I made one last night after Palin’s. (Not quite that much, but enough for the car magnet at least.)
i tried to pay attention, but ended up reading. i looked up every now and again.
jeffrey toobin on cnn was funny. he thought it was the worst ever and boring. anderson cooper suggested that the speechwriters had concentrated on palin and forgot mccain.
Overall, (speaking as a relatively fervent Obama supporter), I didn’t think it was terrible. It at least hearkened somewhat back to the old Maverick McCain, particularly at the beginning. Kind of hard for me to objectively judge it. Didn’t make me either thing “uh oh, all the undecideds are now in his camp” or the opposite.
One thing that seemed to be an outright falsehood was that he said that Obama’s plan for energy didn’t include nuclear or drilling, when Obama, in his acceptance speech, specifically said (although didn’t linger on it) that he would support nuclear and even drilling.
One question: Near the beginning of the speech, when I was just listening on the radio, he said something like “times are tough” and then a chant of “USA USA” started, and then he said something about static. What happened?
Uh oh, you mean he had to write it himself?
protester was lead out. there were 2.
goodness, mathews on msnbc is frothing.
on preview on speechwriting, perhaps he did. that would explain it.
oh, boy msnbc is going crazy with hand puppets and imposters.
I heard some of McCain’s speech on the radio. Maybe it would have been different if I could have seen him, but on the radio he sounded like a tired old man. He had no enthusiasm in his voice at all.
“Trust me to be the agent of change.” Unsaid, but still there, " I might have toed the party line for the last 8 years. I might have voted for every mistake that George Bush made. I might have sucked up to the party powerful and I might have picked a VP I didn’t want. But I’m going to do things differently from here on in. Honest."
So, we have a man who for 8 years did things one way. He campaigned for this candidacy as a Republican. He accepted the endorsement of the outgoing president. He knuckled under to the party bosses and picked a right-wing religious VP. And now - now that he’s got the goodies his party could give him - he writes them off, calling them crooked and corrupt.
Wow. Just, wow.
Nah, it was even worse to watch him deliver it and scarily smile after saying he “has the scars to prove it.” Yes, it was even more painful to watch than to just hear. The conservative base will support him now because he has hooked his wagon to GWBush somehow in drag and on steroids at the same time. They love her extremism, they love her divisiveness, they love the fact that she can deliver a line. But they are not voting for him. They are voting for her and against Obama.
I actually couldn’t sit through it. I lost interest about half way (ok, maybe less than half way) through. To be honest, all the lead up was probably the worst part.
I liked Palin’s speech (AND Obama’s speech) MUCH more. So much for ‘experience’, ehe?
-XT
We’re talking about a man who built a reputation for “integrity” in part by admitting he took favours from Keating…after he’d already been caught. Who waffled on the confederate flag on the South Carolina Capitol building during the 2000 campaign, then tried to claim more “integrity” points for denouncing the flag well after the campaign was lost to him. Who called the religious right “agents of intolerance” in the 2000 campaign only to kiss Jerry Falwell’s ring in 2006 and pick a fundamentalist veep in 2008. Who toyed with rumours about being John Kerry’s running mate before going back to giving Bush man-hugs. Who promised to run a “respectful campaign” once upon the distant past.
John McCain panders, habitually and continuously. He will happily contradict at lunch what he said at breakfast if he thinks it will move him one step closer to the White House. That’s what he is.
What I don’t understand is how can McCain give a speech saying that he respects and admires Obama, saying that Americans just want us (presumably the parties) to stop yelling at each other, saying Palin has in her administration reached across the aisle to Democrats, Republicans, and independents. All this on the heels of Palin’s big speech last night in which she took fairly petty potshots at Obama, his “community organizer” past, and her incredibly divisive “Obama is all about victory-fearing, terrorist-rights-loving, and reducing America’s strength” speech? Obviously Palin didn’t write any of that, but McCain’s speechwriters did. Presumably the same speechwriters who wrote tonight’s speech.
I watched the whole thing, and it was weird. He started off pandering to the base, then towards the middle, he attempted to reassert his maverick creds by dumping on both parties (which I liked). But then he started dumping on Obama, whose greatest crime, apparently, is that he’s so full of himself that he thinks he should be president of the US. Standard stuff. But in the last five minutes, he just went way off the reservation, sputtering things along the lines of, “America is Great! We Will Win! The Time is Now!” That got me disconcerted – they were all true, noble sentiments, but quite detached from the political issues of Sept 4, 2008.
I stayed awake during the whole speech. Actually, I thought that Senator McCain delivered a fine speech. He is not a great public speaker but he comes across as real. Of course I am a bit biased, you see, for I am voting for Senator McCain and Governor Palin.
Senator McCain spoke from the heart and I believed him. He seems far more real the ‘The One’, and because of that far more effective. ‘The One’ is a good speaker, sometimes waxing eloquent but he does not come across as real.
No, I’ve never liked Kool Aid.
Nobama 08
Sarah Barracuda for Veep.