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Welcome, Governor Palin

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I was wrong. I said that the Republican convention would be sedate and wouldn’t generate the same kind of excitement that provided the Democrats such favorable auspices for their candidate’s final phase campaign launch. I “misunderestimated” the effect of Sarah Palin’s most excellent performance on her party’s convention.

Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee spoke. Ho hum. Michael Steele spoke. Yawn. I thought we were in for a boring evening.

However, Rudy Giuliani’s delayed keynote speech was the beginning of a crescendo that would ramp up all the way through Sarah Palin’s speech to the final coda with her family and John McCain on the podium.

Rudy was good. He was funny. He hit at the Democrats’ weaknesses. He showed toughness, forcefulness, and grit, but his delivery was as if he was talking to the guy sitting next to him at the neighborhood Irish pub. He has that smooth stage presence that goes with being a big-time political player for a long time. But tonight, he was the warm-up speaker.

When Guiliani finished, I was surprised by the quick introduction of Governor Sarah Palin, even before the applause for Rudy had died down. The response to Palin’s appearance on stage was raucous, boisterous, and welcoming. This standing ovation went on for far longer than anyone had anticipated, and resisted attempts by floor marshalls to end it by getting everyone to sit down.

So, given all this overwhelming build-up and adulation, you would think that a newcomer to the national political arena would shake a little bit, if not melt in total panic. Sarah Palin ate it up and spit it out. She delivered a well written, well prepared, and very effective speech. And to coin a phrase employed by the Mouse’s loyal opposition, she of the red hair (formerly), she rocked the house.

Not only that, she pissed off the Obama people big time. Heretofore, they thought they had the upper hand, given Palin’s inexperience on the national political stage. The liberal press had been lampooning her for not knowing the Washington ropes, not appearing on Meet the Press, and so forth. Governor Palin’s speech threw that all back at them. Now, I’m not saying that she delivered a knockout punch—not in that way, anyway—but what I am saying is that her opponents, whether politicians or media, now know that she is no pushover.

The media and the Obama campaign will be back at her throat in the morning, if not sooner, because they fear that if their assaults abate even for a little while, Palin’s appeal to the swing voters will incontrovertably surmount their criticism.

She stepped into the vice presidential candidate’s attack dog role with ease, doing so with humor yet with unflinching inner toughness, leading the opposition to warn quickly that glibness doesn’t work, therefore Palin is in big trouble. Weak, flimsy argument. They can’t debate the substance of the speech, so they condemn its style. This Mouse feels that in the paraphrased words of Al Jolson, they ain’t seen nothing yet. Yes, I was impressed.

Did Palin benefit by low expectations? Certainly. Neither I nor most of the people on the convention floor knew what to expect. I started out just hoping that she wouldn’t screw up. What I got was a polished political speech that was as good as any I’d heard at the highest level, but by politicians with long resumes. I think Governor Palin’s freshness on the national political scene worked in her favor and her speech writer deserves a great deal of credit for working with her to take advantage of it.

That brings me to the inital Democratic response to the Palin speech—that it was written by a Bush Administration speech writer, and her running mate voted 90% with George W. Bush, and we can’t take a 10% chance on change. Huh? A bit of a non sequitur there, isn’t it? That rhetoric is getting very tired very fast in its constant repetition as the phrase for all occasions. Besides, that 90% correlation thing has been debunked not only by this Mouse, but also by none other than the left-leaning National Public Radio. Someone needs to bring out the corresponding percentages for Biden and Obama (when he voted). Many of the bills that pass through the senate are not concerned with partisan issues but with innocuous items palatable to both sides of the aisle, for example, a bill honoring Michael Phelps for his Olympics performance. But I digress.

What remains to be seen, of course, is how Palin will hold up in the long run, in more extemporaneous settings. If she can produce this type of performance in a head-to-head debate with a long time Beltway insider, namely, Joe Biden, she will do her part to boost this ticket’s chances. How she handles hecklers at stump speeches and the continual negative harangue by the mainstream media and the rogue bloggers is also crucial. If she is not quick on her feet in these interactive situations, she will be a drag on the ticket; if she performs flawlessly, she will be a tremendous boon to the GOP’s chances in 2008. She has performed well in debates with entrenched politicians in Alaska, which portends well for her. This will be very interesting to watch.

Her line about Obama’s acceptance speech’s vague promises bears mention because of its impact on the audience. “But when the cloud of rhetoric has passed, when the roar of the crowd fades away, when the stadium lights go out, and those Styrofoam Greek columns are hauled back to some studio lot—what exactly is our opponent’s plan?” Great fun and effective, too.

I’ve seen the MSM’s and liberal bloggers’ early takes on the speech, calling it, “immature,” “contentless,” and “a series of cheap shots,” to cite a few sampled comments. In other words, they are worried. That ought to keep them on their toes.

The big problem will be McCain’s at this point—to deliver a meaningful and memorable speech tomorrow night. He won’t have a stadium full of people, and he won’t have Greek columns, only his less than charismatic style and some hopefully sincere words. However, he’s up against a lot. Not only is Palin an impossibly tough act to follow, but Thursday night is the NFL season’s opening night extravaganza. You can expect that the Republican convention’s TV ratings will drop significantly from tonight’s peak. Many convention weary viewers will be watching the Redskins battle the Giants. Last, but not least, it is no coincidence that Barack Obama’s campaign people have agreed for Obama to be interviewed by Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly on The O’Reilly Factor on Thursday night as well. You have to feel for McCain, being up against all that. I don’t know what he can do to bring off a successful speech, let alone eclipse the home run hit by Palin. I’d be tempted to mail it in. But McCain won’t. He’s an old trouper.

The Mouse must now go raid the pantry. It’s late and I have to feed my family.

Night 0.5, RNC

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Hi, again! This is the Mouse Who Ate Xanax, a ravenous news junkie rodent who lives under The Nittany Turkey’s sofa. I sneaked a peek at the Republican National Convention this evening, and I have an opinion. I always have opinions. (I already described what opinions are worth several posts ago.)

There’s a less raucous air about this Republican convention than last week’s Democratic National Convention. One reason is that there were a lot of last minute changes this week due to Hurricane Gustav. The Monday night program was canceled, and Rudy Giuliani’s keynote speech was moved from Tuesday to Wednesday. That’s why I am calling this Night “0.5.” This Mouse also has to think that the Republican constituency is more heartland and less coastal, more small town and less big city—in other words, not as much fun. Choosing presidential candidates is serious business, so I can’t call this a negative.

Furthermore, were it not for the selection of Governor Sara Palin as VP candidate, the Republican National Convention would lack drama and suspense, which we got with the Democrats and the Clintonian dynamic. Tension inevitably will exist between the Clintons and their adversaries. Accordingly, we did not know in advance how either Bill’s or Hillary’s speeches would turn out. Republicans are more predictable. With the exception of Palin, we pretty much know in advance what they’ll be talking about—unless, of course, we’re the overtly biased NBC family of networks, which I’ll address later.

Palin does introduce a cliffhanging element. How she will handle the limelight, how she will defuse the attacks on her family, and how she will portray herself as an executive, we don’t know. This is the biggest speech of her life, and it is a potential turning point for the election.

Major party political conventions these days seldom function as the vehicle for selecting the party’s candidates for president and vice president. Instead, the primary elections serve the purpose of culling out the so-called presumptive candidates and the convention ballots merely rubber-stamp the results of the primaries. The days of multiple ballots and deadlocks long gone, the conventions have become marketing extravaganzas.

The marketing thrust of these two conventions will seek to convince the broad spectrum of swing voters toward its party’s candidates. These are centrist Democrats, Independents, and liberal Republicans who are sitting on the fence. Obviously, at either pole the closed-minded lunatic left and religious right have no intention of moving toward the other side, in spite of Obama attempting overtures to the evangelicals and the Republicans wooing hard-core feminists. Those people at the extrema are lost causes. What these marketing events are aimed at are those moderate women who were offended by their party shunning Hillary Clinton twice and those working people who were equally offended by Barack Obama’s elitist utterances while on the stump in San Francisco, among many other non-pigeonholed voters. Both major parties continue to woo them. Who will do the better job?

President Bush did not attend the convention, but his wife, Laura, and his parents, George H.W. and Barbara, were there. Laura spoke about women in the administration, about VP selection Palin, and the accomplishments of her husband’s administration. I suppose she needed to do the woman thing in order to convince voters that Democrats do not have a corner on the female market. (They do have a corner on the liberal female vote, but it’s the centrist women who will swing the vote McCain’s way. The devout liberals are a lost cause for the GOP, who will gladly concede their vote.) The First Lady then introduced her husband, who would speak to the convention via satellite.

It is interesting to note that this afternoon NBC was reporting that a featured part of Bush’s speech would be about 9/11. The headline actually read, “Bush to speak about 9/11.” David Gregory and company must have gotten their wires crossed. In any case if that is what they were expecting to pounce on, they had  to be disappointed, because there was only one sentence in the actual speech about the attack on the World Trade Center. I was titillated to find that shortly after the President’s speech MSNBC changed the headlines of the same reports to eliminate the 9/11 reference.

Much of President Bush’s speech centered on John McCain’s character, patriotism, and performance. It touched very little on party platform or continuing the policies of the Bush Administration, with the exception of the tax cuts, which Bush said McCain would make permanent. Bush also spoke glowingly about VP candidate Gov. Sara Palin. Essentially, he delivered a one-line endorsement of the ticket. There has never been any love lost between Bush and McCain and it shows. At the end, after introducing his parents, the President turned the floor back over to the First Lady, saying that while he was unable to attend the convention, with Laura speaking the delegates had “traded up.”

I don’t buy xanax online us think Bush’s speech helped or hurt McCain’s chances very much.

Laura concluded with a few words about Cindy McCain. That was it for the Bushes. Finito.

The next featured event was a smarmy and forgettable tribute film about Ronald Reagan.

Former Senator and presidential candidate Fred Thompson then took the podium. After a brief but rousing tribute to Gov. Palin, Thompson spoke to McCain’s courage, character, and judgment. He said, “If you listen to the Democrats, you’d think we were in the middle of a great depression, that we are down, disrespected and incapable of prevailing against challenges facing us.” He spoke of the “history making Congress—history making because it’s the most unpopular Congress in our nation’s history” and what would happen to us if we had that Congress and a Democrat president. The promised tax increases got a lot of attention. “You don’t make citizens richer by sending all their money to Washington.” Then, he hit upon the largely passe abortion debate (or non-debate, for most of us) with a direct shot at Obama: “…we need a president who doesn’t think that the protection of the unborn or a newly born baby is above his pay grade.” That line referred to Obama’s waffling response to a direct question about when life begins at a televised event last month and it got the biggest applause of the entire speech. In all, it was a 25-minute speech and one of the best this Mouse has heard from Thompson.

Senator Joe Lieberman from Connecticut was next on the podium after Chuck Berry serenaded the delegates (pretty hard to do as a dead guy, but possible through the newfangled miracle of recording). A lot of Democrats consider Lieberman a traitor because he does not subscribe to many of the increasingly left-wing intentions of many members of his former party. That earns him points with this Mouse. He is certainly an outcast because of his support for winning the war in Iraq instead of pulling out. And so, he got a huge round of applause when he said, “I’m here to support John McCain because country matters more than party.” Lieberman introduced McCain’s “Country First” motto, as delegates waved placards containing that slogan. He talked about McCain reaching across the aisle to transcend partisanship, in the past and in the future. “If John McCain is just another partisan Republican, then I’m Michael Moore’s favorite Democrat!” Moreover, speaking about Obama’s smoothly pleasing oratory, Lieberman said, “Eloquence is no substitute for a record.” Turning to Palin, he asserted that she is a leader who we can count on to help John McCain shake up Washington. “That’s why I believe that the true ticket for change in Washington is the McCain-Palin ticket.” Lieberman then addressed the Democrats out there in TV Land. “This is not an ordinary election because these are not ordinary times. And believe me, John McCain is not an ordinary candidate.” He said that McCain is a restless reformer who will clean up Washington. In conclusion he asked Democrats and Independents to vote for “who’s best for the country, not for the party you belong to.”

Of course, this will not sway the hardcore left, who have basically excommunicated Lieberman and who would never move toward the right unless someone held a gun to their head. (When that happens, it will be too late.) As this Mouse mentioned before, the marketing aim of both of these conventions is neither to convert the hardcore nor to preach to the choir. The former aim would be spinning wheels; the latter would be a waste of valuable marketing time. Instead, the focus must be on swinging the swing votes in the respective direction of the party in question.

In this Mouse’s opinion, tonight’s two main speeches were well directed and good, but not great. Still, the talking points were largely effective, and the speeches by Lieberman and Thompson will indeed sway some voters.

I would not expect much of a “bounce” in the polls after tonight, as the nation awaits with bated anticipation tomorrow night’s performance by vice presidential candidate Sara Palin in the face of vicious attacks on her personal life from the far left. I would love to see her step on their mud-slinging faces. That’s the kind of toughness that will shut them up, if she can suck it up and sling it right back at them. The left’s fear of Palin and what she represents is evident in the magnitude of their attacks; a counter attack by her would send them cowering behind their electronic launching pads wearing their tinfoil helmets for protection and drinking the proverbial Kool-Aid. (End of gratuitous, non-objective, anti-liberal extremist rant.)

Tomorrow night will feature Palin’s speech and the rescheduled keynote address by former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. Nobody will listen to Rudy, but we’re all ears for Palin. This Mouse will return with more blathering drivel soon.

New Politics for a New Time?

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As your political Mouse, I viewed the Obama-rama tonight with my little rodent mind wide open, my little rodent nose twitching alertly, and my little rodent whiskers at attention. I had no expectations other than it would be a gigantic spectacle. What I got was a gigantic spectacle with a well rehearsed and delivered, inspirational speech replete with some McCain put-downs that will come back to haunt Obama, as well as a standard litany of empty liberal promises.

I have no doubts that the inspirational and well delivered aspects of the speech will cause a bounce in the polls. At this stage the polls mean nothing but I still want to give credit where credit is due. The speech was good. Not great, just good. However, Thursday night speeches at presidential nominating conventions are always inspirational and well delivered. We expect it, so it should come as no great surprise that we get it.

Completely to Obama’s credit, this was a truly historic occasion, a momentous one in this country’s history. Not a single politician in today’s political arena could have filled that stadium—not George W. Bush, not John McCain, not John Kerry (snicker), not Al Gore (chortle) and neither Sheryl Crow nor Michael McDonald. Only Obama, the Pope, and the Rolling Stones could have brought 85,000 people to Invesco Field. That is pretty impressive.

What Obama attempted to do with his well-rehearsed speech and his meticulous TelePrompter assisted delivery was to preach to the common man (or woman, already), the workers. Those are the votes he is after. Undoubtedly, he has been coached to move more toward the center to attract more votes than he could by maintaining his hard-line liberal (#1 most liberal voting record in the senate) posture. What he seemed to try hardest to do was to convince the voters with his bio film and his speech that he was a common man—one of them—not an elitist who doesn’t connect with the working man, the hunters with deer rifles, and other assorted little people he has offended in his primary machinations. Very clearly, much of the speech was an attempt to regain their confidence. We kept hearing about the workers. (Has a Communist Party ring to it, but I digress.) He said he is not a celebrity and that the whole thing was about them, not him.

Another large portion of the speech was directed at the current administration’s failures, from which he extrapolated John McCain’s ultimate failures along the same lines. His handlers seem to be hanging their hats on McCain voting 90% with President Bush. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to have a ten percent chance of change,” Obama said. Numbers like that are meaningless, if you make yourself aware that most of the bills that are voted on in Congress are not associated with partisan issues. For example, a bill honoring the New York Giants for winning the Super Bowl would get an all but unanimous vote. Let’s look at Obama’s record in the same context. Even the most liberal voting member of congress would have voted “with President Bush” on a substantial number of bills. Of course, the 90% thing, associated with an unpopular president, makes McCain sound like a Bush clone. He isn’t. But Obama had to say it, because his programmers want him to, and because the Bush 3 accusation is one of his campaign’s linchpins.

Another big indictment of McCain was that he believes in supporting big business and “trickle-down” to the masses. (The workers.) Obama said that what this translates to is you’re on your own. In this Mouse’s mind, that is a good thing. As an individual, you determine whether you succeed or fail. “Government” should not be supplying safety nets, which in this Mouse’s mind translate to disincentives to productivity. So, this particular bit of ideologically based McCain bashing is just campaign rhetoric. Yeah, Barack. We know that Democrats are the populists who are the great saviors (and vote buyers) of the people. We get it. No need to rub it in, unless you’re campaigning for the idiot vote.

Obama paid lip service to reaching across the aisle and uniting America. How? He’s never done that as a U.S. Senator. So, it’s just talk. McCain has actually done it (viz. McCain-Finegold and McCain-Kennedy). Will Obama actually eliminate partisanship with his naïve “New Politics for a New Time?” If he, himself has never reached across the aisle in his brief career as a senator, why should we believe that he will do so as president?

Obama bashed McCain for “wanting to continue [the] misguided war” in Iraq, and claimed credit for wanting the troops out of Iraq. This rhetoric seemed rather feeble, almost preposterous, as the truth of the matter is that the Iraqis have now proposed a timetable for our withdrawal by 2011. In other words, the surge that Obama failed to support worked. Iraq would have gone completely to hell and many more of our servicemen would have been maimed or killed there without that surge Obama did not support. That the war was “misguided” is immaterial in the context of how to best proceed from this juncture. The fact that the Iraqis and the Bush Administration have worked out a withdrawal by 2011 has clearly taken the wind out of the Obama sails and his handlers don’t like it one bit. It is pretty hard to spin this area believably, so they’re really pushing it. They’re promising what has already been decided.

That’s the problem with Thursday night acceptance speeches. They’re generically big on promises and short on solutions. Obama told us what he would do in many different spheres, but mostly the same old liberal laundry list. To say that the objectives were pie in the sky would be generous. For example, he promised to end our dependence on Middle Eastern oil in 10 years. Pretty tall order. First of all, even if he manages to get himself elected, he will not be in office in 10 years, but that’s beside the point. How? That’s the big question. Is it even possible? This Mouse thinks that in this promise, Obama was trying to duplicate the can-do spirit of John F. Kennedy’s promise to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. That it was 10 years from January 1961 to the end of the decade suggests that Obama believes the Kennedy time horizon will work for eliminating dependence on Middle Eastern oil, too, and that it will inspire the development of a cohesive program to get there. Maybe that is possible, but unlike a space program that the entire country could get behind as a matter of pride, there are too many special interests in today’s complex society to expect that the same thing could occur in providing renewable energy. Environmentalists alone will throw the monkey wrench into any plan for drilling for oil or for building nuclear power plants. How long does it take to plan and build a nuclear power plant, given the plethora of red tape involved? Can Obama accelerate that timeline? How?

That’s the big question for the night: How? (Does this sound like a Lockheed-Martin commercial?)

Further itemization of clearly enunciated campaign promises without any elaboration of “the how” followed. Here is the laundry list:

  1. We will create a new tax code that rewards those who create jobs, not the people who wrote it – a tax cut for 95% of the people
  2. In 10 years we will finally end our dependence on oil from the Middle East
  3. We will provide every child a world class education
  4. We will provide affordable health care for every single American
  5. We will provide more sick days and family leave
  6. We will change bankruptcy laws so pensions protected
  7. We will change Social Security so benefits are protected
  8. We will implement equal Pay for equal days work

And, of course, to placate the working men of Pennsylvania who are also inveterate hunters, we will abide by the Second Amendment to the Constitution, which gives us the right to bear arms, without putting AK47’s in the hands of terrorists and criminals. (I’m glad he disassociated those two nefarious classes of humanity, or lack of same.)

Again, the foremost question is: How?

Well, Obama had an answer, at least for the funding how. He would eliminate tax preferences for those doggone greedy corporations who already make enough money and he would go through the federal budget line by line in order to eliminate “programs that don’t work.” Oh, yeah? How is he going to determine what works and what doesn’t work. Any ideas which programs we’re talking about here? We can’t figure out the how without knowing the what. Furthermore, this recycled Carter campaign promise is completely unrealistic in view of the way congress works against any contraction of government—particularly Democrat run congresses. Jimmy tried, but he was frustrated, winding up defensively making a public speech with a huge flow chart that demonstrated the steps necessary to fire a civil servant. It was beyond his capabilities to eliminate even a single civil servant, let alone entire bureaucratic departments. What makes Obama think he can succeed in doing so? Answer: He knows he can’t, but he doesn’t think we know he knows. You know?

At the conclusion, he dragged out the speech by invoking that famous Republican civil rights crusader, the late Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., who 45 years ago this day marched on Washington with his dream. With his voice quavering à la King, Obama referred to “the preacher” and what he said in Washington. He then took a page from JFK’s 1960 Los Angeles acceptance speech when he quoted scriptures. (JFK referred to the prophet Isaiah; Obama just went with the generic scriptures.) He finished off with God bless you all and God bless the United States of America. Again, with the preacher voice. Very dramatic, rousing, and probably effective. But will it offend the atheistic component of his constituency?

This was an inspirational speech, but the content was recycled Democrat promises we’ve been hearing for the past 20 years. This is change? I think not. A package of tired old political promises wrapped in shiny new paper with a great big bow does not signify change. It’s business as usual in a pretty package. None of those promises ever seem to come to fruition, even if those who enunciate them actually get themselves elected. I wonder why.

This Mouse knows that there will be a nice bounce in the polls due to Obama’s speech, but that the Thursday night euphoria will not last very long. It’s kind of like a one-night stand. When the afterglow fades, one tends to ask, “What the hell am I doing here?” Sooner or later, people will ask, “How?” and similarly wonder what they’re doing in one camp or the other. They will need much more than vacuous acceptance speeches to formulate their voting direction, no matter how inspired they are by the flashy rhetoric. The real answers will come out during the three scheduled debates between McCain and Obama. These broadcast public appearances will probably determine who wins the forthcoming election. Not that tonight’s speech or next Thursday night’s should be considered wasted by any means—they’re great marketing tools and they nicely set up the campaign path ahead, but between now and the debates, realistic and believable answers for these “how?” questions will have to be generated by each candidate’s organization.

To be honest, a couple of completely unrelated things could screw the Republicans at this point, once the euphoria fades. One is Tropical Storm Gustav, which may or may not hit New Orleans, but will certainly energize the full efforts of Democrat attack dogs to bring back old, nasty memories and make it clear that Bush and the Republicans screwed up New Orleans in Katrina (with no mention, of course, of the then extant Democrat Mayor, an idiot, and the Democrat Governor, an idiotess). So, that’s one thing, especially since the current Louisiana governor is one of the GOP’s bright, shining hopes.

The other is McCain’s vice presidential selection, which is imminent. The candidate will be announced Friday noon, in Dayton. At the time this Mouse is writing this, it is known that Mitt Romney will be in Dayton, but Mike Huckabee will not. This does not mean that Romney is the selection; it just means that he is still a possibility. The perception of the vice presidential candidate by the voters can either make or break the McCain campaign.

Now that the lights are out, this Mouse is going to sneak into the kitchen and feed his furry face. I’ll write more from under the sofa tomorrow.