McCAIN’S SPEECH….Like Hillary Clinton, John McCain isn’t a naturally great speaker, and that showed tonight. Overall, his acceptance speech struck me as flat and pedestrian, full of boilerplate and talking points.
But that’s not to say it wasn’t effective. It might well have been. For one thing, McCain successfully dialed down the red meat, something he desperately needed to do after last night’s culture war fest. He addressed substantive issues more than previous speakers. He was good on the bipartisan roots of corruption in Washington — which didn’t go over so well on the convention floor but probably did at home. And he was very good, I thought, when he was talking about war and national security. He sounded like the farthest thing imaginable from a hawkish neocon, and his line about working to build good relations with Russia while not overlooking aggression was just what the doctor ordered. Nobody watching this speech would guess that this was a man who never met a war he didn’t like.
And the peroration at the end? It seemed to me like he was trying to match Barack Obama’s brand of soaring rhetoric, but it didn’t work. It’s just not something McCain can pull off, and it clearly didn’t raise the house the way Obama’s final few minutes at Invesco Field did.
Still: it was workmanlike and competent and he hit most of his marks — though some of those marks (e.g., his support for a culture of life) didn’t get hit with much passion. But the base didn’t need any more pumping up after yesterday, so that’s probably not a problem. Bottom line: I have my doubts that this speech is going to sway a lot of votes, but it was OK.
On a slightly different note, though, are the convention planners idiots? Did they really have him standing in front of a green screen for minutes on end during the middle part of his speech? It looked terrible.
And I guess they decided that Heart’s “Barraucda” would be Sarah Palin’s theme song after all. They didn’t play that last night, did they?
