Is the Mendacious Spin Finally Over?
Republican hatchetman Alex Castellanos on Obama's speech:
411mania.com: The Republican analysts on CNN also praised the speech, with Alex Castellanos coming right out and saying whoever doesn't get picked as McCain's VP probably should consider themselves lucky after the speech Obama game...
Republican hatchetman Pat Buchanan on Obama's speech:
SeattlePi: Pat Buchanan, MSNBC's token conservative, was nearly as effusive. The former Reagan speechwriter said Obama's address was "a genuinely oustanding speech," perhaps the greatest convention speech he has heard, adding: "This wasn't a liberal speech at all, it was a deeply centrist speech..."
Republican hatchetman Bill Kristol on Obama's speech:
Over on FOX, the commentators were unsurprisingly less breathless, yet Bill Kristol, the most prominent neo-conservative pundit in the country, acknowledged that Obama was masterful, that he exceeded expectations and that McCain is facing a very tough challenge...
"Thoughtful conservative" Ross Douthat of the center-right Atlantic Monthly on Obama's speech:
Ross Douthat: [F]or the most part [Obama's speech] felt surprisingly banal and jury-rigged, and it suffered throughout from a failure to cohere around any single theme or rhetorical style. There was a lot of liberal boilerplate (recruit an army of teachers, tax the rich, etc.) that could have fit easily into any Democratic acceptance speech of the last twenty years; there was a series of swings at John McCain that, while often effective, seemed more appropriate to a veep's speech than to an address by a Presidential nominee; and then there was a half-hearted attempt to return, in the speech's final third, to the themes of post-partisanship and national unity that defined his '04 convention speech. The whole thing felt schizophrenic - part Clintonian laundry-list, part McCain-bashing polemic, part "beyond red and blue" peroration - and watching it I was left with the impression that Obama would have been better off just sticking with the high-flown inspirational style that got him here, and waiting for the debates to recast himself as the meat-and-potatoes guy who can throw a punch and get down into the policy weeds. Hindsight is 20/20, of course, and you can see what Obama and his speechwriters were trying to do - namely, have the best of both worlds, by being soaring and substance-oriented, combative and post-partisan. But the substance was predictable, thin, and rife with pandering, the combativeness felt faintly inappropriate, and the speech didn't soar nearly as much as it should have. It was a historic evening, for Obama and for America, and there were moments that gave me shivers just watching on TV - but if you didn't go in sold on the Democratic nominee, I think it was ultimately something of a letdown.
