Boy, McCain loses on speaker points. Bless his heart, he looks so uncomfortable up there. I think he handled the hecklers okay, but you’d think a lifer from the Senate might be a little less deer-in-headlights.
If anybody would be on top of quashing protesters during a speech, I’d think it was the GOP. Epic fail for security!
I did like what he said about Obama. Classy. Pretty much everything else he said I disagreed with, but that’s to be expected.
The background is bizarre. When Mike Huckabee spoke, I think they had a shot (live) of the local elementary school’s front lawn and parking lot. WTF?
Why are we back to his P.O.W. story? How is that going to help this country with the foreclosure problem, our energy problem, our lack of standing in the world, the devaluation of our dollar, and so on and so on.
We get it. You were tortured and you were brave. And we appreciate it. Sincerely. But jesus this is getting old and tiresome. It’s so completely irrelevant.
Tom Brokaw: “But the fact is, governor, that you’ve had 8 years of a Bush administration and a lot of Republicans in Congress for the last 8 years, so why wouldn’t the American people say, 'Look, they had their shot. We’re gonna change?”
Tom Ridge: “Uh, because John Bush… [grimace] because John McCain is very much his own man…”
Ok, I love how just after the line about teaching an illiterate adult how to read, they show someone holding up a homemade sign that reads:
Wow. If he writes his own speeches, he ought to be ashamed. If he has speech writers, he ought to fire them. That was the most disjointed, rambling, strange speech I’ve ever heard.
I noticed both last night and again tonight the Reps are selling “Be scared! The boogie men are out there and we are the only ones who can protect you!”
Talk about a Freudean slip. I’m glad you heard this too, because I thought I was hearing things. There’s no way Tom Ridge could’ve just called McCain “Bush,” I thought to myself.
I was hoping I could say something respectful and laudatory about McCain tonight, but that was a pretty boring speech. I think that, once again, they made the mistake of pitching the speech right at the Republican base. National security, flag waving, POW [drink], but nothing about health care, nothing useful about the economy, nothing about getting out of Iraq – just the usual, self-righteous bullshit. Somebody needs to tell the McCain campaign that they have to try to appeal to somebody besides Fox News fans.
I really do think that McCain brought in the Rovians, and they all decided to go with a motivate the base campaign strategy. I just don’t see how that can work when the Republican base has been dramatically shrinking and the Democrats has been exploding.
Sorry fuckos, once too many times to the well. Maybe if you clean house and come back as a party of integrity rather than a party of shit-sandwiches, you may have something.
I don’t think the Republicans are expecting to win on policy. They’re running on two things - scare the people into believing that Obama will raise their taxes, and off-shore drilling. Everything else is image, as it was in 2000 (and oh, what a lie that image was - W ran as a moderate!). Most of their voters, I think, are the low info voters who wouldn’t know a policy if it bit them (which it has). So why bother presenting policy?
The Dems are trying to win on policy, so they do have to provide details. THey’ll get the poorest of the poor, who are probably also low info voters, but other than that, they’ll get people who are more interested in solutions than symbols and who don’t consider tax relief the single most important civil liberty.
