Saturday, September 6, 2008

Saturday

Lazy day at home with the kiddos. Still recovering from all the awake time and all the sleep time mashed all over the wrong times for the last many days.

Something I like best out of nearly everything is hanging out with the Boyo. He's a kick in the pants sometimes. Today he has been feeling just a little neglected because of my attention to the needs of the ever pooping Sweet Pea. He's been serenading us on the piano, a toy drum, a toy flute, and his guitar. Some of his songs are wonderful.

He was singing of the joys that are blueberry muffins, and how if he is a good by then we'll all have ice cream for supper, except his sister, who just gets milk!

I'm going to finally watch McCains speech tonight. I've heard some good things about it, so I'm looking forward to hearing it.

I made the mistake of reading Palins speech before listening to it. It was very well written, and having been a public speaker before, I could well imagine the effect it would have on its intended audience. Then I heard her. I was less than impressed with her delivery. It seemed obvious where breaks should be, where one would wait for crowd response, where emphasis would be best used. But she seemed to be muddling through the the teleprompter as if reading it for the first time. It was unfortunate because it really was a well written speech. It just didn't sound like she knew it very well.

I haven't read McCains transcript yet. I want to hear it first so I don't have the Palin effect.

Wish me luck!

More Later

2 comments:

ssouth said...

It was stated after her speech was given that Palin got so much more applause than was anticipated during her speech, that it was being edited as she gave it. Whole sections were being removed as she spoke. I thought she was fabulous.

skrelnek said...

There was also a rumor that the teleprompter was broken and that she was making it all up as she went along. That turned out to be false, as a lot of the people at the convention had a good view of the teleprompters throughout, and confirmed that they were working just fine. I hadn't heard about the on-the-fly editing.

I also thought her delivery was stilted, which isn't surprising, since the speech was written to be delivered by another candidate, as McCain's campaign confirmed. They tweaked it a bit to fit her, but it was mostly a speech intended for Mitt Romney or Joe Lieberman to deliver.

I really didn't like either speech, McCain's because it was so flat, and Palin's because it was a litany of snarky attacks, devoid of any policy specifics. I couldn't believe it when she compared herself to a pitbull, but she certainly worked hard to live up to that comparison in her speech. I'm not even gonna talk about all the out-and-out lies, since that would take more than a blog comment. But I'm an unrepentant progressive, so it was unlikely that I'd like the Republicans' speeches anyway.

What I really don't get is why the biggest theme of the Republican convention was change. I don't understand how the party responsible for the last 8 years of poor governance expects us to believe that keeping them in the White House will somehow produce change. McCain traded in his "maverick" credibility years ago when he cuddled up to Bush. During the Republican primary debates, he very proudly talked about how he's voted with Bush over 90% of the time. Now that we're in the general and he has to appeal to independents, he's shunning Bush as much as possible, but his record for the last 8 years makes it clear to me that he's no "maverick," he's just more of the same.

Sorry to launch into a rant on your blog, John. I just get really worked up over this stuff.