Thursday, September 4, 2008

Reaction to Palin's Speech

Congrats! A potential vice president of the United States can read a teleprompter. There seemed to be a lot of enthusiasm surrounding this revelation after Palin’s speech. This was apparently all Sarah Palin needed to do to prove she was ready for the vice presidency. The hypocrisy of this moment, as a friend of mine pointed out on his blog, before the speech, was striking:

“A quick note on tonight’s Palin speech: beware of the hypocrisy of Republicans on this. They claim that Obama only gives a good speech, but you’ll hear them say that Palin has proven her substance after tonight’s speech. It'll be a good speech, but, again, we need more than that.”

Some have commented that this speech was on par with the Obama speech of 2004. I have to laugh at this, because for one the speech that Sarah Palin read was clearly written by someone for her, packed with about 30 minutes of lines pulled straight out of the McCain commercials we’ve seen for the past month. Obama’s speech was written by him, and then tweaked by others. Palin’s was a speech predicated on division, while Obama’s was a salvo for unity. For all the energy put into the conservative base by the Palin pick, I can only imagine that her speech tonight did the same for the liberal base.

The speech didn’t do anything for me. I had several issues with the actual substance, or lack thereof. I found the initial introduction of her family, and constant brandishing of a 4 month old baby with downs syndrome like a trophy a little hard to take after the outcries from the republicans over the past few days insisting that the media leave the family alone. Also, I found it a bit disconcerting that she was able to lie so well, about her record and Obama’s record, during her first appearance on the national stage.

The thing that irked me the most were the attacks on Obama, and community organizing. She ridiculed, and mocked Obama’s time spent as a community organizer by saying that being mayor was the same thing, accept she had actual responsibility. The funny thing about this is that she never actually outlined that responsibility. But, more to the point, mocking someone’s job is never a good thing. Community organizing in the sense that Obama did it is rather unique. However, on a broad scale, I’d venture to say there are a lot of moms and dads out there who have done some level of “organizing” in their own communities who might not take so kindly to having their service disparaged. Random question. Aren’t union leaders kind of like community organizers? Maybe I’m wrong about that. While the snarky line went over well in the hall, I see this as an opening for the Obama campaign to exploit in a good way. But for all the attacking of Obama, her inability to actually deal with her own substance was very telling.

This was the “prosperity” night of the convention. One would think we would have heard a bit more about her and John McCain’s economic roadmap for America, outside of “Drill baby, Drill!”

At the end of the night I’m still left with not really knowing anything of importance as it regards Sarah Palin’s views and experience on national security, the economy, health care, and a litany of other issues that the people she claims to be apart of worry about everyday. They wrote the speech, and she stepped up and delivered it. Good Job. We’ll see over the few remaining weeks before the election whether she can take it as good as she gave it on this night.

1 comment:

JB said...

I found it particularly annoying and offensive the comments that both Palin and Giuliani made deprecating the work of community organizers. Without the work of community organizers, odds are they would not be where they are today. And if Palin can't see that being a mayor of a city, especially a city poopulated by a little less than 5500 people in the 2000 census, isn't anything more than an elected community organizer, she's much more mindless than I thought--and is truly misinformed about the "real responsibilities" of community organizers. Check yourself, Palin!