1. Boring White Guys: D. This included Tired Old Man John McCain, Rob "Who?" Portman and Tim Pawlenty Bland. These cats couldn't excite a mouse tick in an Alabama shithouse. (Didn't see the speeches of Mitch McConnell or Rand Paul, but does it matter? They get lumped in here too).
2. Mike Huckabee (former presidential candidate and Ark. Gov): B. Not a barn-burner speech, but a decent one, and a welcome departure from the Boring White Guys who preceded him. Entertaining me, and not boring me, is always huge with this Independent when it comes to these partisans on both sides.
3. Condoleezza Rice (Secretary of State under W Bush): C+. She's never been an elected politician and it showed. Didn't seem overly comfortable (although she improved as the speech progressed and was much better at the end, garnering her the "+" in my grade above). Speech was too heavy on boring wonkish foreign policy discussion at the outset, and lofty cliches throughout. This one was reminiscent of Chris Christie last night: Not a bad speech, but I expected more. On a side note: I noticed that leftist propaganda outfit MSNBC actually carried Rice's speech after ignoring all speeches by black and minority gop-ers last night. Shock!
4. Susana Martinez (New Mexico Gov.): B-. This speech was my first big exposure to Martinez, who hasn't gotten a ton of media play nationally in the past. Not a great deal resonated with me in a major way, substance-wise, from Martinez' speech, but this broad has a certain in-your-face, firebrand style that's difficult not to like or at least be entertained by (sorry Jeeves for ending sentence on a preposition).
5. Paul Ryan (Romney VP selection): B+. A complete Tale of Two Speeches! When Ryan was selected by the Mittster recently, my observation in this space is that Ryan's strength is talking off-prompter, speaking contemporaneously -- at which he very much excels. In turn, I observed that Ryan's previously appeared to me to be fairly mediocre giving the prepared speech (he struggles with not being very natural when reading words in a speech -- an observation first formed after the State of the Union response he did in the past few years). So I wasn't expecting (in contrast to someone like Chris Christie) a knockout speech from Ryan tonight. And that's precisely what he delivered in the first 2/3's of his speech: Mediocre. I had a "C" penciled in for him for most of his speech.
But Good Grief did Ryan pick up his business in the last 1/3 of the speech! He suddenly seemed natural and energized, and he almost perfectly hit upon speech text explaining the leftist extremism of the individual we currently have as a president. If Ryan had been that engaged throughout the speech, he'd have earned my second "A" grade after Artur Davis last night. My fellow Gen-X'er Ryan (a personable sort who's nonetheless way to the right of me), at the end of tonight, did himself and King Flipflopper a lot of good with this speech. And to think, I was fully prepared over here to be for voting "C" on Ryan, before I was against it!
I'M THE RAGER, AND I APPROVED THIS POST.
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