So, if you watched it, what did you think of it?
I am once again finding that the latest speech isn’t online yet. I wonder what’s up with that?
*Update*: C-SPAN to the rescue!
Defending the liberal tradition in history, science, and philosophy.
Defending the liberal tradition in history, science, and philosophy.
So, if you watched it, what did you think of it?
I am once again finding that the latest speech isn’t online yet. I wonder what’s up with that?
*Update*: C-SPAN to the rescue!
{ 32 comments }
It was a good speech. I was slightly relieved to see a return to form. I noticed he peeved some people when he mentioned that many people in congress are fighting for their own interests instead of the people who elected them. This is a true statement and I was hoping to see some people cringe considering that he’s supposed to be reforming government and that includes republicans. He even mentioned the dread "education topic". He also didn’t parrot the same mantra over and over repeatedly and handled his hecklers eloquently.
I have returned to my previous state of ambivalence towards him.
He ain’t too great at speechifying, but…………
I don’t put much stock into speechifying. The man is an authentic hero, an authentic leader.
He was right about the surge. He’s earned my vote this election.
HB
On my "content is king" scale, I’ll put it at an A-. He didn’t introduce much new, but he clarified and amplified some of his better positions, and reinforced his stance as a cross-the-aisle worker. He also did some nice rhetorical jiu-jitsu, coopting the change theme and making it his own by challenging his party to change themselves and work to change the country.
Pity about McCain-Feingold. I could really support this ticket if it weren’t for that.
John McCain is not a gifted public speaker, but he did pretty good tonight.
The speech didn’t really do much for me. John McCain did serve the country very honorably, but that does not make him the best qualified to be president. His policies make no sense. He wants to increase spending on the military and cut taxes even more. We are running huge budge deficits, which he proposes to eliminate them by cutting taxes and reducing spending, but he never identifies what spending. The Republican party had control of both house of Congress and the Presidency, and they could not cut spending. John McCain was there in the Senate when all this was going on.
Energy policy is basically drill, drill, drill our way to energy independence with a little natural gas, nuclear and clean coal thrown in for good measure. Ever since the 1980s politicians have been talking about energy independence, and we are now far more dependent on foreign energy sources. McCain is opposed to extending tax breaks for wind and solar. Instead he wants tax breaks for oil companies and gasoline tax holidays.
I would have a lot more respect for John McCain if he would come right out and say, we need a free market solution to the energy problem, and high oil and gasoline prices are the free market at work. Those high prices will drive us to energy independence. My only real objection to this policy is that it is transferring too much wealth to Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Iran and Russia. If we want to use the free market, we should put a large import tax on oil, further reducing US consumption. Yes that would mean even higher prices, but the money would be going to the US government and not unfriendly foreign governments. The US could cut income taxes to make up for the oil import tax. But no politician has the guts to say that out loud, even though they probably all know it is what we should do.
I only watched the first 25min. It was the John McCain of 2000, the one I’d have voted for over Al Gore had I been given the chance. Thouhg Id have voted for Bradley over mccain, but anyway…
too bad his rhetoric about transcending the partisan attack was pretty hollow given his attack dog veep’s speech last night. The dig that Palin made at commmunity organizers really was just too much.
I say things like this out loud all the time, Mikeca. But I’m just an obscure writer/ranter living out in a south central Wisconsin boonie.
If people were paying the true cost to our national economy of these petrofuels, it would be multiples of $4/gallon.
I think they will scratch away at some offshore oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and in the Alaska wildlife preserve. I don’t think it will yield them much more than a few years worth of petroleum to burn up at the rate our transportation system now uses it.
As for the Colorado oil shale and the Alberta tar sands, huge parts of the landscape will be torn up in the frenzy to dig up these petroleum sources. In the case of the rocks, they will use up vast amonts of energy to heat them to some 600F degrees in order to loosen the oil from the rock.
And in Canada, they will do even more environmental damage at great expense to squeeze oil from what essentially is a naturally-occuring form of asphalt. There will be even more destructive strip-mining for coal to be gasified and turned into vehicle fuel.
So, all things considered, get ready to pay a lot more for your vehicle fuel.
What they ought to be doing includes the following:
1) Electrify, double-track and improve the right of way of  the 36,000 miles of the main US rail lines.
2) Use at least the spur lines of the rail system as lineal sites for a major system of electric power generating windmills, taking advantage of the fact that the rail system will faciliate hauling in the structural components and the railcar-based cranes to assemble the components on site.
3) Use the same rail network and spur line right-of- way as utility corridors for a new national electric power transmission grid that will be needed for an economy and way of life built around clean, non-polluting and renewable electric power, to replace the economy and way of life of burning up a finite supply of petroleum-based hydrocarbons.
4) Upgrade rail rolling stock, track signal systems, etc, to run semi-high speed freight and passenger trains at 100-120 miles per hour, enabling the rail system to capture an increasing and one day dominant share of the freight carried on highways since World War II, along with the much of the intercity passenger traffic. Forget the high-speed trains of France and Japan. Ours must travel much longer distances. But average cross-country speeds of 110 mph, combined with the far lower cost per unit of weight that rail transport offers compared with over-the-hhighway vehicles, and we will once again have a national transportation system as efficient as the one that carried virtually everything and everybody during the critical years of World War II.
5) Encourage early trends now in place to upgrade as many residential, commercial and industrial buildings with solar electricity collecting panels whose output can be used both to heat and power the buildings and to add electric power to the grid.
6) The vehicle industry economy itself will quickly replace gasolne powered vehicles with new designs such as the GM Volt — a true electric-powered auto with a state-of-art high capacity but low cost batter and a small auxiliary fixed RPM ethanol-powered generator; this will be in mass production by late next year, regardless of politics. Forty miles between plug-in recharges, without use of the generator; 400+ miles between refills for generator juice. (They’ll do even better when they equip these cars with biodiesel-powered generators, and up the distance to 600-750 miles).
In short, an electrified steel interstate system, combined with allowing the economy of supply and demand to accomplish its own wonders in transitioning away from a non-renewable source of energe in favor of a source that is as long-term as the energy given off by our solar system’s own star.
———–
I heard the speech, and it was as great as I thought it would be. Governor Palin speaks better than Senator McCain does, and is has far more pure stage impact. But I was going to vote for McCain irrespective of any of that. I never have trusted Obama, and I think Biden’s foreign policy notions are largely disgraceful.
I’m a veteran of military service late in the Korea war period, and I had never given much thought to what had happened to John McCain after he was shot down over North Viet Nam. Now I have a much clearer picture in my mind, and I have sort of figured out why he cannot raise either of his two arms above shoulder level. They probably had some of the most proficient torturers on duty at the Hanoi Hilton, since the era of the nazi camps that specialized in sadism. It is a wonder he kept his sanity through those years, to say nothing of his loyalty to God, country, uniform and self-respect.
Truly a man who can  stand up among the greatest of men.
But I think that Sarah Palin is the factor that will win McCain’s campaign for him.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
By the way, so nobody will accuse me of plagiarizing my ideas, sort of like a backcountry Joe Biden, I got the idea of the electrified steel interstate from the research and writings of Alan S Drake, the Oil Drum blogsite, and a consortium of Virginia rail industry specialists, who themselves picked up the term "steel interstate" from a former federal official who apparently coined the term in one of his speeches to rail industry freight transportation officials some eight years ago.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
I have to say that I did not wind up watching all of either Obama’s acceptance speech or McCain’s; both were boring as hell for me. The only speeches I really liked were the ones by Biden and Palin. Probably because I haven’t heard so much from them, their roles as running mates being so new so their speeches actually were interesting.
Being an already-firmly-decided voter, these speeches weren’t aimed at me anyway. I suspect we’re going to see a fairly tight election though.
Sarah Palin: "Women want to be with her, men want to be her." [h/t protein wisdom]
McCain’s speech: If we can take/extend a Naval warfare metaphor, then Palin was a broadside killing Obama’s ‘DNC bounce’. His speech, then, is coming about for the next, or to board….
It wasn’t a bad speech. Not the kind of thing I expected but that’s probably good.
I liked what I heard, but I thought it was pretty predictable. It basically followed my comment from yesterday.Â
And I fell asleep for part of it. Same as I fell asleep during Obama’s.  Â
I thought his wife’s speech was atrocious, but her background video was pretty informative.Â
The highlight for me was Wednesday night, by a landslide. Giuliani, Lieberman, and Palin, all were great, IMO.  I didn’t fall asleep that night….Â
I should point out that I don’t like Palin’s voice.  It grates on me at times.  But I can handle that.Â
Overall, I thought the R convention was much more energized and lively than the D’s last week.  That surprised me a bit.Â
Just as interesting was Obama’s interview with Bill O’Reilly last night.  They’re going to drag that one out over 3-4 days, which kind of sucks.  But the first segment was certainly entertaining, and a tad enlightening.
She does sound like Grace, from Ferris Bueller:
"Oh, he’s very popular Ed. The sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, waistoids, dweebies, dickheads – they all adore him. They think he’s a righteous dude."
Or the cop from Fargo:
"And I guess that was your accomplice in the wood chipper."
Yeah, the Fargo cop entered my mind too.
This convention was the original Star Wars trilogy. Tuesday was A New Hope setting the stage and introducing the players, Wednesday was The Empire Strikes Back, where we find the true soul of the characters, and last night was Return of the Jedi, which was entertaining, even though it was full of Ewoks and entirely predictable.
Aziz: I don’t think Palin’s speech was full of partisan attacks. It was more accurately a direct attack on Obama and Biden as the candidates. Their ideas, regardless of party source, are unsound and she pointed that out.
The speech was partisan only because O&B belong to a particular party.
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John, I disagree. the example i have in mind was Palin’s disparaging of community organizers. it was a cheap shot and completely without any grace.
Aziz, that was entirely deserved. The first statement out of the Obama camp was "So he nominated a small town mayor", completely ignoring the fact that she’s the freakin’ governor of a state! Given that, I think it’s quite fitting to ignore Mr. Obama’s current job, and refer to him as Community Organizer Obama.
That wasn’t about community organizers. It was about the Obama campaign’s complete lack of class.
no, martin – obama himself called her by her title right away. youre thinking of bill burton. obama has been nothing but gracious.
Of course, Aziz. The candidates always let their proxies sling the slime. You can’t seriously have been fooled by that, can you? You’re smarter than that. Let the proxies slime, get the slime into the discussion, and then disavow it. That’s SOP.
Martin, that’s sort of, well, silly.  No on ignored that she was governor of a state.  Everyone knows that, just as everyone knows that Obama was a Senator.  Each was discussing what OTHER experience they each had, and attacking that.  And I think we should probably leave judgments of what is or isn’t classy to times when we aren’t in the middle of an highly partisan election.I don’t think there’s much argument that the RNC has overwhelmingly about attacking Obama, often in very dishonest and nasty ways, while the DNC was about what Democrats want to do.  You may not like what they want to do, but their attacks on McCain were far less common and far less vituperative.  Obama didn’t, for instance, claim that McCain voted to cut funding for troops, even though by the logic McCain’s people use, he did (i.e. each man voted for a funding bill that had extra conditions they liked, and against one that had conditions that they didn’t like).  But if you want to arbitrate classiness, who comes out classier there?McCain articulated that he was all about change, but didn’t really put forth any examples of things he plans to do differently than the current administration.  He’s already tossed away most of the stances that did make him different, and we’re left with a vague impression of someone willing to buck trends trying to be applied to a guy who spent the last year trying to convince the base that he was a good party man.What specifics there were didn’t make much sense. Palin balanced the Alaskan budget: how did that happen do that?  By massive amounts of money from things like taxes on oil, and massive amounts of federal earmarks to make up for state funds.  Is that what McCain proposes for the nation as a whole?  Probably not.  So why cite that as a plus?  He talked about reeducation, even subsidizing worker’s incomes: but that costs money.  He’s really going to fight to spend more?  Really?  That’s John McCain?  And if he is, where is that money going to come from, if he’s talking about even more regressive tax cuts?He talked about energy independence as if it had everything to do with more local drilling.  But anyone with half a brain knows that oil is a global market.  The comparatively small amount of oil in the US is not going to significantly end the leverage of OPEC and world market forces.  It might make some Americans more wealthy, and that’s great.  But there’s no actual long term solution there that makes us independent from the Middle East.  Nuclear power is one solution: but McCain simply lies when he implies that Obama is against it. And so on.
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I don’t think there’s much argument that the RNC has overwhelmingly about attacking Obama, often in very dishonest and nasty ways, while the DNC was about what Democrats want to do.
Great example of "eye of the beholder" there. There’s plenty of argument.
The Obama campaign jabbed at Governor Palin. She jabbed back. That makes her cheap and graceless, and them classy. Got it. Love that objectivity there.
Bad, you are wrong.
That was the Obama campaign’s first statement.
This is his own words:
Obama so far has refused to mention her experience as governor.
So his great claim to superior experience is managing a campaign?
He was barely even a real senator, he’s been pretty much running for President since he’s gotten into the Senate. I’d love to know how much of his time he actually spent doing whatever it is a Senator does?
If you think the dems didn’t attack the reps in their convention then you were watching a different event than me.
maggie,
Campaigns attacking each other at their conventions is only news to those still clinging to the "our candidate is different with a different kind of politics" myth, and to those who really don’t understand the eye of the beholder.
I can’t believe I fell asleep on the couch before the speech started and did not wake up until about an hour ago ;-)
I’ll watch it in a few, so thanks for posting it Dean. I guess from what I read there are mixed feelings. I don’t really want a gifted speech reading fella in the White House, I really don’t. To me that is just a popularity contest. I am looking forward to the debates and who has the true grit.
Jams, you made me laugh over Palin’s voice;-) A voice can rub you wrong and that is how I feel about the author and radio talk show host, Laura Ingraam. Man I love her morals, I loved her book and went to see her when she was promoting it but, on the radio, is another thing.
Eyeglass sales are up and orders for Sarah palin’s type frame came not be made fast enough. I think that is so neat. A man being interviewed here threw his hands up in excitement because he said he has always been called, "Four Eyes", and now he was just plain good and smart! Gotta love what the Sarah effect will do. Her hairdo will be that rave!
Love this election, just love it!!!
Not all community organizers are created equal. Sure, most of them help out with unemployment, homelessness, etc in their communities. But in the Chi-town context it refers to foot soldiers of the Democratic party political machine who, on the streetside level, get votes sometimes by any means necessary.
MJ,
Yes, I’m with you on the Laura Ingraham thing too.  It’s strange. I agree with a lot of her discussions, and I think she is absolutely beautiful when I see her on TV.Â
But I can’t watch or listen for more than 30 seconds.  Her voice is like finger nails on a chalkboard to me.  My wife thinks I’m insane!Â
I wouldn’t put Palin into that bad a category though.  But who knows, maybe as time goes on it will wear on me more and more. Â
Well, I think it was a good speech. What he had to say matters to me. No, I did not hear a lot about promises of what he will do. I don’t want a bunch of promises, I want action. I want a Congress to reach across party lines.
I have to be honest and say that I do want McCain and Palin. I want this country safe and protected as it has been since 9-11. Sometimes I shake my head because our borders are so open but, something worked. I think it is the good men and women defending the borders (like my Son ;-) Hey, he is an ICE agent and I’m a proud Mom).
McCain said just enough for me. I can understand why the Republican’s went on the attack against the Democrats. Good grief, they did not show how proud they were to be Americans and have been telling us how bad we are, how many mistakes we have made and on and on with the media falling all over the great Wizard of Oz…bama. I like Obama, but he is not ready to lead this country and I think someday he will be.
McCain needed to get to the conservative voice and between him and Palin they seemed to have done that.
Jams, thank you for responding. I do like Laura Ingraham enough to listen to her program from time to time. Well, I will try to listen more since she is an honestly true conservative like me.
Off topic:
I love that Sarah is not only beautiful and smart and wears high heels, but she is down right sexy and I hope men will be a ble to say that without some crazy feminist cutting them down. I want a t-shirt with her smarting a rifle. I guess I’m not the only one, as that is also on millions of Americans mind. Anything with her name is being made as fast as possible. I also want one of lil’ Piper putting her hands in her mouth, spittin’ on her hand to groom her little brother ;-)
Palin’s comments did not particularly disparage community organizers, only said that Obama has less relevant experience than Palin because community organizers do not have responsibility in the same way as governance (city or state). That’s hard to argue with, particularly given the history of ex-Presidents who had principle experience as state governors prior to Presidential office while the number of ex-Pres’s who were community organizers is historically ????.  Â
This was clearly and unequivocally in response to Obama (and company) disparaging her experience and is pretty much on target: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_organizer
After this election it will be apparent that being a senator is just as good as being a governor considering that 16 U.S. Presidents have been governors and 16 have been senators. The 4 years as senator is better than the 2 years as governor IMO because they both add to the candidate’s political experience. 4 > 2. Being able to negotiate in a quorum has its benefits to add to a leader as well as balancing a budget. In fact the Governor of a state is typically smacked around by it’s own state senate anyhow.
 2 years is not as good as 4, and of course 4 is not as good as 30. People are so fixated on governorship and it makes no sense looking at historical trends.
I think you’re mistaken there, JRogge. Only a small handful of members of Congress (House and Senate combined) have ever gone directly from Congress to the Presidency, and of the few who did the record was mixed. In fact we have elected as many or more Generals as President than we have sitting Senators. Governors are most common, followed by Generals, followed then by Vice Presidents and Senators, with House members dead last.
It gets a little confusing because some guys have been both a Governor AND a Senator at some point in their careers. But I’m one of many who has long thought Senators make lousy candidates; it’s too easy to make them look wishy-washy and they honestly don’t have much managerial experience in most cases.
I’m with Dean on this issue of senators and members of the House of Representatives going right into the White House with no experience running the executive branch of a state or city government.
One of the elements of her background that make Sarah look so good is the fact that her two years of executive experience running Alaska’s state government is two years more than any of the other three candidates.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
So James Monroe, and John Tyler don’t count according to your rules. Fine, the it’s still 14 to 16. Big whoop.
Hey Carter was a Governor first what a great president! Certainly not John F. Kennedy who was a senator. Lyndon B. Johnson, the guy that greenlit the civil rights bill and cracked down on the KKK and other domestic terrorists in his reign as president? He must have been a Governor… oh wait he was a senator. Harry S Truman the guy who had to make that tough decision… a governor? Nope.
I don’t remember Lincoln being a Senator or a Governor but he was a pretty good lawyer and congressman.
I’m not saying Governorship isn’t good experience, but it really is a matter of opinion and it is not a fact to say that governors are better than senators.
A small handful my foot.
Now does a governor make a better candidate that is more convincing to the sheeple for purposes of winning the election? Probably, mainly because they don’t have a voting record that can be used against them. Put whether or not they actually do the job better is really up in the air.
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