GOP Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin debuted on the national stage last night and gave a terrific attack speech. She's clearly an accomplished, comfortable speaker and enjoying her role.
It's fresh, attractive packaging, but I do hope people look past the presentation and realize that she's offering the same tired right-wing ideology we've endured for the last eight years.
Here are a few reactions from around the web.
Democratic VP Candidate Joe Biden (emphasis added):
"Well, my plane was landing. I only caught the last two-thirds of the speech, but I was impressed. I think it was a skillfully delivered political speech with confidence and directness and so I think she did what she was supposed to do. I was impressed.
"I was also impressed by what I didn't hear in the speech. I didn't hear a word--didn't hear the phrase middle class mentioned, I didn't hear a word about health care. I didn't hear a single word about what we're going to do about the housing crisis, college education, all the things that the middle class is being burdened by now.
"I didn't hear the words Afghanistan or Pakistan where al-Qaeda lives and bin Laden resides, so I also, you know, there was a deafening silence about the hole that the Republicans have dug us into and any specific answers to how the McCain-Palin ticket is going to get us out of that hole."
Well, it took a while, but the Republican National Convention sure woke up last night, inspired by Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin into a howling, sneering, fist-shaking state of rage at the temerity of Barack Obama in offering himself for the presidency.
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The Obama campaign quickly got out a very thorough truth-squad piece on the various attack lines deployed by Palin. Suffice it to say that those lines spanned the spectrum from light snarky jibes to distortions of Obama's record and views, to bold-faced lies. Palin's already getting hammered near and far for her fully rebuttable claim that she fought the "Bridge to Nowhere," and to a lesser extent, for her naked pander to the parents of special-needs children (not the best appeal to make explicitly, given her record in Alaska). But more important in the long run are the assertions both she and Giuliani made about Obama's lack of legislative accomplishments (much of the Obama truth-squad document is composed of a long list of these), and the gross mischaracterization of his tax proposals, which would actually cut taxes for families earning less than $250,000.
On a much broader front, the speeches we've heard in St. Paul are remarkable for how little they've involved discussions of policy, particularly on the economy.
In Palin's speech, oil drilling and the ancient totemic appeal to the magical properties of tax cuts were the only prescriptions offered for the U.S. economy. Health care? Not a word. The housing crisis? Ditto. Income inequality? Nada, or, to use the word chanted by delegates during Rudy's attacks on Obama's record, "zero." As for foreign policy, the main thrust of the entire Republican Convention has been the dubious claim, unshared by a majority of Americans, that we are on the brink of total victory in Iraq, unless Obama takes office and continues the troop withdrawals that both Iraqi and U.S. leaders are already undertaking.
Finally, the entire "maverick" and "reform" and "change" mantras of the GOP convention, which we'll hear a lot more about in McCain's own speech tonight, are astonishingly audacious. You'd never, ever know from last night's speeches that John McCain and Sarah Palin represent the incumbent party in the White House, the party that's largely controlled "Washington" for the last eight years (and in Congress, until 2006, much longer than that), or that both of them support virtually all of George W. Bush's domestic and international policies.
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