Election 2008
(2008-09-05)
KENTUCKY
(WEKU) -
One of the great media cliches concerning American politics is that such and such public figure accomplished this, but "questions remain." The phrase "questions remain" means that a politician is a state of limbo in which they're currently doing well but still expected to stumble or fail. In this context, the basic "question" that "remains" is when the specter of failure is going to catch up with them.Unfortunately for Sarah Palin, her speech lands her right in the middle of the "questions remain" cliche and the specter of failure can readily be seen hovering around her.
Well Done. I'm pretty sure that Palin's Republican Convention speech was the speech of her lifetime. It was a very well-written speech that paid extensive tribute to John McCain, hit hard at Obama, and avoided a lot of the Republican, family, and personal landmines in her path.
Palin started slowly but was speaking with a great deal of confidence at the end. She's not as substantial a political figure as Hillary Clinton and couldn't command a stage and an audience the way that Hillary commanded the Demcratic convention.
No surprise there.
But Sarah Palin is at least as good a speaker as Joe Biden and was definitely more in control of her emotions tonight than the veteran Senator from Delaware was during his VP acceptance speech.
And the fact that Palin performed so well only a week after her surprise nomination is a testimony to her quick learning abilities, determination, and courage.
Good for her.
But Did Anybody See It? But "questions remain." One of those questions is whether many people were watching her speech on television by the time Sarah Palin started talking around 10:30.
The big problem was that Rudy Giuliani turned out to be an incredible prima donna. Because of Hurricane Gustav, Giuliani's keynote address was moved from Monday night to tonight but Giuliani made no effort to adjust from being the opening night headliner to being a warm-up act to Palin. Consequently, Giuliani reiterated the story of John McCain's imprisonment as a POW in Hanoi, got out all his attack lines on Obama, and milked every applause line for everything it was worth until he was running 20 minutes over.
All of that might have worked on Monday as a way to fire up the crowd at the beginning of the convention. But that was Monday. Tonight, Giuliani seemed arrogant, smug, and vaguely offensive even as he was defending Palin against the sexism of the media. William Schneider of CNN pretty much has it right:
[Giuliani's] speech is about mockery - and I wonder whether that's appealing to voters. I really think this tone is going to turn a lot of voters off - it's ugly, it's bitter, it's nasty. There is a bullying tone to this speech . . .Actually, I think that most people are bored with Giuliani's kind of habitual nastiness. But I've been wrong on these things before.
Unfortunately, Giuliani's grandstanding took up enought of Sarah Palin's time that the last image many people carried away from the Republican convention tonight was Rudy Giuliani smug arrogance and sparkling dentures.
What About All That Clutter? Given the enormous controversy that's erupted around Palin over the last week, her job as a public speaker tonight was to break through the media clutter about her abuses of power in Trooper-gate, her husband's membership in a separatist party, her support for earmarks before she was against them, her daughter Bristol's pregnancy, and the stupidity of the boyfriend's MySpace page.
That's a lot of media clutter and there's evidently more right around the corner.
To break through all of those stories, Palin's speech would have had to be so good that Palin emerged as a lovable public figure beyond questioning. That's what Ollie North did with his appearance at the Iran-Contra hearing and what Barack Obama accomplished with his keynote address at the Democratic Convention in 2004.
But I don't think Palin's speech was that good or even close to being that good. As a result, the shole Sarah Palin mess is still hanging over the McCain campaign. Because she was unable to eliminate all the "questions" about her, Sarah Palin's speech didn't solve the problems that her hasty nomination caused for the McCain presidential campaign. Given that "questions remain," Palin's speech is probably going to be a failure in the long run.
Palin's speech was better than Biden's, but it was less of a success.
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