What Were They Thinking?

I watched it because I felt a professional obligation. I cringed, shouted at the screen, turned away, prayed for it to stop…and it wouldn’t. I wondered if they had a vaudeville hook somewhere off camera left over from the days of the Ritz Brothers and Sol Minsky. If they did, why wasn’t somebody using it? It was so bad that even the Code Pink disruption squad was transfixed in mind-numbed awe. Who could possibly have let it happen?

I’m talking about the Cindy McCain speech.

It was simply excruciating to watch. It was painful. It was destructive. It was as though you went to a Rolling Stones concert and the opening act was your Uncle Buck singing his favorite folksongs and plucking an untuned banjo. Your star was coming up; the guy you expect to swing the world to our side and you’ve got this synthetically sincere, overly-rumpled big-haired, bleached blonde delivering heart-felt, not-well-rehearsed tear-jerkers forever and ever. She’s putting the crowd to sleep. She’s driving them out the door to look for a rowdy bar and watch the NFL opener. She’s forcing even political junkies to wonder if Eli Manning is going to have another great season.

I know the candidate’s wife has become a traditional speaker at conventions. She shouldn’t be, but that’s the way we do it now. She could be a policy wonk like Eleanor Roosevelt or a graceful, cultural icon like Jackie Kennedy, or a warm educator like Laura Bush, but still she isn’t the candidate, won’t be making the policies, and needs be nothing more than a semi-firm hand-shake in a diplomatic receiving line. We want to “get to know her,” so we demand that she speak at the convention now.

Michelle did it, and we were supposed to be reassured that she didn’t have a machete, an Afro and a torch to burn down the establishment. She was a cultured, educated, articulate, professional woman who is an American and married to the candidate. Maybe she helps the cause, maybe not. But, she did it on Tuesday, not Thursday. That’s the key.

Gustav caused the GOP to prudently pull the plug on Monday which caused Tuesday to get adjusted and then some fool decided that Cindy should get Thursday…right before the big guy. Bad choice!

The speech was terrible. Inane, trite, cliché-ridden and simply boring. It said nothing and said it poorly. Where were the wits and insightful writers who pumped up Fred Thompson, Rudy Guiliani and Sarah Palin? Could the same crew have done Cindy’s speech? No way.

The delivery was even worse. She simply isn’t very good at public speaking. She might be sincere and warm and loving, but she doesn’t look it or show it in public. She did much better on Wednesday night when she spontaneously cradled Trig Palin for a few minutes. That was good theater, the speech was bad acting.

Did John McCain recover? Well a couple of up-beat rock anthems helped, but I wonder if the folks who checked the Giants game came back. It was uphill for quite a while and McCain isn’t a fire-and-brimstone preacher. He’s no Jeremiah Wright when it comes to crowd rousing. He finally got in touch about twenty minutes into it when he started talking about his Hanoi epiphany and he segued into a very nice oratorical crescendo at the end, but the damage was done and he was starting out in the hole.

What were they thinking?