I watched as much as I could stomach of the speeches at the Republican National Convention. Admittedly, I didn’t watch as much as I probably should have, because some of the speakers make my skin crawl.
I listened to Giuliani, and Huckabee and Fred Thompson. I caught most of Sara Palin’s Speech that sounded like a Mad Lib Mix-up of past Republican speeches. Last night I’d had enough and chose football over convention coverage. Then came McCain. I listened to the whole damn thing, and still don’t know anything about what he wants to do except “change too” and that he’ll fight me.
Change is something anyone can agree to as long as that change is ill defined, or something environmental that does little to nothing. Speaker after speaker harkened back to the ideas of the Reagan years. Over and over the attendees were peppered with old ideas, old skewed reality, old logical fallacies, and outright lies. Apparently, Republican change is something that means a new person dolling out the favors. I guess that’s the easiest kind of change to accomplish.
As a person who makes a living doing events such as these, though with a decidedly smaller audience (the media doesn’t usually dedicate 4 days of broadcast time to my events), the Republican Convention lacked cohesion with the message of the candidate whose message is less about us and more about him (Maverick, POW, etc.). This event was homage to the past, thrown for a guy that has occasionally stuck his finger in the eye of the establishment dead set on maintaining that past. Seriously, the Kool-Aid must have been strong in St. Paul.
McCain will get a slight popularity bump from the coverage, but in the end people need to ask themselves if they learned anything more about his campaign than they new before…that he’s a Maverick, a former POW, and dislikes the status quo so much that he hopes to be the one to help maintain it.
Now I need a shower, because even talking about this has made me feel dirty.