Quick impressions of Palin’s speech
I missed the last 15 minutes of Sarah’s speech because TiVo had stopped recording it (and I was at a meeting when she was live), but I came away with some strong impressions nevertheless. (I’ll watch the whole speech sometime today, because I know I missed the substantive stuff.)
1. Sarah glows.
2. Her family is ridiculously good-looking.
3. The absolute cutest moment was when Piper, holding Trig, licked the palm of her hand and used it to smooth down Trig’s hair. That is precisely what a little girl would do if she’s all dressed up and holds a living doll in her arms.
4. When Barack came on the stage to his tremendous acclaim, he kept saying “thank you, thank you.” Although it should have come off warm, it instead sounded weirdly remote and robotic. Sarah just stood there beaming. Her thanks were in her smile.
5. Sarah’s delivery was perfect. I’ve complained before that I find Obama soporific. He has a rhythmically up-and-down cadence that makes me lose track of the words and just hear the rise and fall of his voice. Sarah’s speech is less even, although not so uneven as to sound unnatural. What it sounds is conversational. It feels, not as if she is talking to you (or, worse, down to you), but as if she is having a conversation with you. Big difference.
6. I thought the introductions to John McCain and her family were good. A little bit of human interest, without big, long gushing.
7. I loved the way she broke from the speech to tell the hockey mom joke. I know she’s told the joke before, but it was a lovely natural response to all those hockey mom signs being waved about.
8. I was completely unsurprised that Sarah did not break her speech halfway through and spit a huge chaw of tobacco on the stage. Given the responses from the MSM — they were all agog at the quality of her speech — I think that they, unlike me, were expecting that she would do something embarrassingly declasse.
9. I thought it was interesting how Sarah attacked Obama, making snarky comments about his community organizer work, his horrible remarks in San Francisco, etc. She said these things with a smile, like a high school joke. I might have said that was a bit too “low” for what should have been an elevated speech, but for three things: (1) this is a competitive race; (2) Obama gave one of the nastiest speeches I’ve ever heard when it comes to attacking his opponent; and (3) as the VP candidate and not the Presidential candidate, she has a bit more leeway than McCain will if he wants to keep high moral ground.
10. I thought her brief summary about the effect of Obama’s tax plans was good, although I would have preferred a line about people making money, not government.
11. Aside from an overall excellent speech, Sarah also had a few brilliant lines, aided by the fact that she delivered them well. For example, this whole anti-Obama riff worked well:
This is a man who can give an entire speech about the wars America is fighting, and never use the word “victory” except when he’s talking about his own campaign. But when the cloud of rhetoric has passed … when the roar of the crowd fades away … when the stadium lights go out, and those Styrofoam Greek columns are hauled back to some studio lot – what exactly is our opponent’s plan? What does he actually seek to accomplish, after he’s done turning back the waters and healing the planet? The answer is to make government bigger … take more of your money … give you more orders from Washington … and to reduce the strength of America in a dangerous world. America needs more energy … our opponent is against producing it.
Victory in Iraq is finally in sight … he wants to forfeit.
But this was my favorite pair of lines, akin in rhythm and content to Kennedy’s famous “As not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country”:
In politics, there are some candidates who use change to promote their careers.
And then there are those, like John McCain, who use their careers to promote change.
12. My husband, an ardent liberal, turned off Obama’s speech, since he was bored by the platitudes and thought it sounded false. He listened to every recorded minute we had of Palin’s speech. Of course, maybe he was just waiting to see if she’d spit that tobacco on the stage….
If you missed the speech, here’s a great video.
