Night One: No Help
Teh Fred! Vid Added

Comparing this to the Democrats' night one: I guess they won, since supposedly people bought Michelle Worf-Obama's Little Miss Sunshine act. So they accomplished their night one goal.

Fred Thompson's speech was amazing. But then, the nets didn't carry it. Someone suggested, jokingly, they should bring out Thompson for an encore tomorrow night.

As daffy as that sounds, I think they ought to. I could stand to hear it again. And this time the McCain folks can let the goddamned networks know they expect them to cover the major speakers as they covered the Democrats' major speakers.

Let me just say that while Thompson's red-meat was dripping crimson and crazy-tasty, the high point was obviously his recounting of McCain's heroism in captivity. I knew the broad outlines of McCain's injuries and torment, but I have never heard it all laid out -- every wound, every broken bone, every pulverized tooth, so many beatings -- laid out sequentially like that. The auditorium was as silent as a pope's funeral and so was I.

I might not like McCain much as a politician, but goddamn I'll give it to him for being a fucking man. And a real patriot.

Lieberman was... well, Lieberman. His tone sounds halfway between the most boring atonal song in the world and half-dead moose moaning in a ravine. Some (like Howard Wolfson) suggested his case might play with Clinton voters -- Wolfson pointed out, which I missed entirely, Liebs' positive mention of Clinton was, of course, directed straight at the Hillary PUMA voters -- and maybe that's true, but I can't evaluate that. He wasn't speaking to me on a political level; hell, I'm not even sure if he was speaking to me on a physical level. He may have been calling together the Moose Moot for all I know.

Bush was... Bush. I'm frankly tired of listening to him. I'm not tired of him, just tired of his cadence and always-disappointing delivery and tropes of speaking. Even if he trots out new tropes, they sound similar to old ones, and I can barely listen to him anymore. He's only wowed me in a speech once (you know the one), and only really grabbed me a couple of other times. For a guy who's the leader of the free world and was pretty cocksure even before that, he sure seems to shrink and become something of a callow and timid young boy when a camera's in his face.

People at NRO are talking about how dead the convention seems, how empty of both people and energy. Party that's due to gulf state delegates being absent. Part of it may be due to the cocked-up nature of this truncated convention and the polls, which show Obama comfortably ahead for now.

So: Overall, one great speech, but probably much better received by partisans than swing voters, and it was only heard by (at best) one third of the total intended audience. A couple of snoozers of questionable impact.

No help.

On the plus side: American conservatives got a fever, and the only prescription is more Moose Belle. The whole convention lives and dies on Palin's speech. Lot of weight on those slender shoulders, but I kinda think she's going to pull it off.

posted by Ace at 11:50 PM

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