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The Barracuda is a Tough Act to Follow

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This convention weary Mouse eschewed the season opening NFL game tonight in order to view the final night of the Republican National Convention. I later found out that the New York Giants had defeated the Washington Redskins, 16-7.

In any event, tonight was a night that will be largely forgotten in the long run; whereas last night will linger in our memories for a long, long time. The Barracuda is a tough act to follow, rendering tonight anticlimactic.

There were more pedestrian speeches, nothing special. However, it is worth noting that Cindy McCain carried herself well on stage for this being the first time she’s faced a major audience. Once she was done, it was time for the McCain acceptance speech.

McCain is not a charismatic speaker. Expectations were low, although the audience on the floor seemed to be hoping for some fire and brimstone, which they really never got. Furthermore, McCain speaks best to an engaged audience in a town hall atmosphere. The Teleprompter is a hostile environment for him.

The speech started off slowly and stiffly, as McCain worked through the basic cordialities, thanking family, party, the troops, and “my friends” for making it possible for him to be standing there. It is interesting to note that in this section of the speech, McCain paid tribute to President George W. Bush with a one-sentence passing mention recognizing Bush for leading us after 9/11. That was it, the last direct reference to Bush, although later on, McCain would indict the present cast of characters in Washington for losing touch.

Appealing to the conservative wing, he asserted that “we [meaning Republicans] lost [the people’s] trust. We’re going to change that. The party of Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Reagan is going to get back to basics.”

McCain portryed himself as a fighter who proudly wears the “maverick” moniker. He emphasized country before party. In doing so he set the stage for enunciating his differences with not only his opponent, Barack Obama, but also his own party and “business as usual” in Washington.

He ran through a series of core issues, contrasting his approach with those of his opponent. One of the first subjects was education, which McCain described as “the civil rights issue of this century.” He said that equal access had been gained but then he asked, “What is the value of access to a failing school?” He would create competition, empower parents with choice, remove barriers to recruiting new instructors, reward good teachers and send bad teachers packing. To sum it up, he said, “Obama wants schools to answer to unions and bureaucrats; we want schools to answer to parents and students.”

If rhetoric could kill, the National Education Association would be dead and buried tonight. Alas, it will be a helluva lot of work to free our broken education system from the shackles of malevolent, self-interested unionism.

McCain stressed individual responsibility and initiative, with minimal governmental intervention, instead of expansive government programs. Tax reductions instead of massive tax increases, health care reform that will allow individual choice instead of having “a bureaucrat standing between you and your doctor,” opening markets and preparing workers for new, permanent jobs, and attacking the energy problems on every front.

He would drill new wells offshore and drill them now, encourage construction of safe nuclear power plants, promote clean coal technology, encourage development of wind and natural gas energy sources, and provide incetives for development of hybrids and alternate energy automotive engines.

Cleaning up Washington and increasing transparency and accountability of government are standard lines for both party, but McCain promised a roomful of Republicans that he would go after waste no matter which party was supporting the wasteful spending. He would veto the first pork barrel spending bill that came across his desk and he would name names to the American public. Shades of Ronald Reagan.

I wonder whether Sarah Palin will auction off Air Force 2 on eBay.

A zinger for both Republicans and Democrats by McCain: “Constant partisan rancor is not a solution, it’s a cause…it’s what happens when people go to Washington to work for themselves, not for you.”

McCain then recounted the story of his imprisonment and torture, and how it transformed him. “I wasn’t my own man anymore; I was my country’s.” For this segment of the speech, he shitcanned the teleprompter and spoke from the heart.

Finally, he gave the audience a rousing send-off, exhorting them to “Stand up! Stand up! Stand up and fight!”

It was clearly a speech that reached out for the undecided vote. How successful that outreach will be remains to be seen. Palin certainly improves his chances with the Independents and undecideds. But will they believe that McCain is a fighter who can change Washinton?

Unlike the splashy, outdoor finale by the Greek temple Democrats, the final moments here were the typical confetti and balloon drops, augmented by pre-recorded fireworks playing on the big screen that served as the backdrop for the podium. Nothing overly spectacular.

This tired Mouse will let the pollsters decide who bounced higher and suchlike. It is time for this campaign to begin in earnest, which means lots of commercials and phone calls. At least we won’t have to hear the annoyingly haughty, “I’m John Kerry and I approved this message.” Both Obama and McCain are more pleasing to the ear. (Thanks to John McCain and Russ Finegold, we still have to listen to that stupid drivel.) We’ll have stump speeches and debates. This Mouse will come out when he sniffs a story.

By the way, this horny mouse notes that the women were hotter at the Republican convention than at the Democratic convention. Just an observation, folks.

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.