I can understand not voting for the ticket, and I will not vote for it. I can buy an argument that she is unready to be Vice President (but I won't buy that argument in absence of an agreement that Obama is just as unready). But you have to admit her speech was great.
It was, indeed, a great, great speech. You can disagree with her, you can say she lied or made unfair implications. But you can't, on any credible level, say that she didn't hit it out of the park. She attacked like VPs are supposed to, she showed a backbone of iron without being unpleasant to listen to. She made it very, very hard to say she's unready to campaign at the national level.
Olbermann worked like dog to figure out how to criticize it, and he certainly managed to find a way, it was just a pathetic display of a non-journalist supporting his own preconceptions.
Again, I disagree with everything about her domestic policies, but I can admit when someone's done a marvelous job, and she did just that.
Liam, I eagerly await your Brazilean arguments on why it was a crappy, awful, bumbling display by someone barely in control of her own saliva, let alone the English language.
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I decided I couldn't watch it. I watched Romney and Huckabee. Huckabee was entertaining. I disagreed with or was disgusted by almost every statement either of them made and I couldn't stand to watch any more, even though I had intended to watch Palin. I honestly almost had thought that most of the DNC speakers had been just fantastic and how hard it would have been for anyone to find too much fault if they really tried to set aside their biases and listen. Now I know that the Republicans watching the DNC, no matter how great I thought it was, probably disagreed with or were disgusted by nearly every statement.
Without agreeing or disagreeing, my impressions of the various speeches so far are (and this evaluates their effectiveness against the obvious goals:
Excellent/Perfect: BClinton, Palin
Good/Great: BObama, MObama
Good: HClinton, Biden, Thompson, CMcCain
I haven't listened to any but Palin and Thompson on the Republican side and I'd have to go back to remember some more of the lesser Dems.
Palin was a beauty queen and a TV newsreader, so I didn't expect her to have any trouble with the Teleprompter, and she did not. For that matter, she's almost certainly a better public speaker than McCain. Her speech was some red meat to a dispirited convention that badly wanted to go back on the attack. So as far as that went, the speech was "perfect."
That aside, I don't think she'll wind up the rhetorical counterpart for Obama. For one, her voice is shrill and grating. Tolerable when you're preaching to the choir, but not a persuasive or reassuring tone. Also, sarcasm in the lightweight neophyte is unbecoming -- she is too new and does not have the standing to credibly criticize, and mockery works better when coming from an authoritative figure. And (yes, Matt already conceded this point) the speech was riddled with factual inaccuracies (which used to be called lies).
In summary: I agree that she'll be effective on the stump and will be effective in firing up the base. I do not yet agree that she's "ready to campaign at the national level," not until I see her handle skeptical journalists face to face, which she ultimately will need to do to be a credible candidate.
Well please note that I used the word "lie".
Oh, BTW, are you seriously arguing that there is some degree of comparison between Palin and Obama's experience? Seriously? Because you're wrong, dead dead wrong.
She's been governor for eighteen months, and I'll allow that does count as some experience. But as mayor, I'm sorry but that just cannot count for anything more than PTA-level experience. As I pointed out, my budget is bigger than hers and I have more people working for me. And Wasilla actually has an administrator for the day-today management, so she doesn't even have that granular a level of "executive" experience.
But Obama has been editor of the Harvard Law review, a constitutional law professor, a state legislator, an accomplished Senator, and also managed a $500 million organization which just happened to defeat the most powerful political machine in the US.
Obama has more relevant experience and is more ready to lead on the national stage than George Bush was in 2000. He has been a national political figure longer than W was, more international experience, more national security experience, more elected office experience, and a more serious pre-electoral experience. So if you agree that W was "unready" in 2000, then I might agree that Obama is "unready" to a comparable degree, but I do not think either is or was actually unready. Bush may have turned out to be incompetent and evil, but that was not due to insufficient experience on his part.
Point taken re: "lie." I was snarking mostly at the media, who seem very averse to ever using that word, as if it's impolite, or all truth is subjective.
One other point made on Daily Kos about Palin: You are looking at the next generation's Phyllis Schlafly.
I think that's dead-on. She's hard right, telegenic and well-spoken, female, and the darling of the conservative crowd. Barring the possibility she is actually VP, I do think that she will be a prominent Conservative for years to come -- her career really has been launched here. Whether she stays in electoral politics, or goes the think-tank/pundit route, I think she'll be a fixture on the Teevee in the future.
Reactions:
From the right -- rapture
From the media -- quite positive, though inaccurate
From the left -- predictable
From the independent voters? Not so great. Independents in a focus group in MI, and women in focus groups in NV both were turned off by her speech. Interesting. I wonder whether the media narrative ("Great speech") will influence independents who didn't actually watch the speech.
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