{"id":15760,"date":"2008-06-04T10:16:39","date_gmt":"2008-06-04T14:16:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/15760.html"},"modified":"2008-06-04T10:16:39","modified_gmt":"2008-06-04T14:16:39","slug":"mccain-tries-to-steal-dems-thunder-but-ends-up-all-wet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/mccain-tries-to-steal-dems-thunder-but-ends-up-all-wet\/","title":{"rendered":"McCain tries to steal Dems’ thunder, but ends up all wet"},"content":{"rendered":"

John McCain, for all of his flaws and troubles, has assembled a professional team of advisors and consultants. Most of them are high-priced lobbyists, which, while raising ethical questions, reminds us that this is a crew that knows how to play to win.<\/p>\n

And I can probably imagine their thinking going into last night. Barack Obama was poised to deliver a victory speech at the site of the Republican convention before thousands of enthusiastic fans. Hillary Clinton was poised to give a high-profile speech of her own. “I know,” one of McCain’s strategists probably said, “we should put our guy out there, too! Why let Dems have the whole night to themselves? We’ll have McCain deliver a big speech, we’ll put it in prime time, we’ll come up with a green backdrop. The whole thing will be awesome<\/i>.”<\/p>\n

After having watched the speech, I have a hunch those same campaign aides are kicking themselves. This was just awful<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/param><\/param><\/embed><\/object><\/p>\n

The whole transcript<\/a> is online, but to fully appreciate how bad the speech was, you really have to watch. On the substance, McCain tried a little too hard to distance himself from Bush — it had a powerful “protest too much” quality to it — while suggesting that he, a Washington insider for the last three decades, is the ideal agent of change.<\/p>\n

On the style, McCain was sweating, he couldn’t read his teleprompter, he spoke in front of a slightly nauseating backdrop, and his audience was made up of 200 or so bored Louisianans.<\/p>\n

Best of all, the McCain campaign scheduled the speech so poorly that the senator was still talking when the polls closed in South Dakota, and the networks interrupted<\/a> McCain’s comments to announce that Barack Obama had won the Democratic nomination. In other words, thanks to poor planning, the McCain campaign scheduled a speech for prime time in just such a way to ensure that people wouldn’t hear the end.<\/p>\n

This, of course, was in contrast to Obama’s electrifying event in an arena full of supporters.<\/p>\n

What an amazing way to kick off the general election phase of the campaign.
\n
\nHere’s the unintentionally hilarious coverage viewers on MSNBC saw:<\/p>\n

<\/param><\/param><\/embed><\/object><\/p>\n

And here’s the extraordinarily insightful analysis CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin offered once McCain was done:<\/p>\n

<\/param><\/param><\/embed><\/object><\/p>\n

Andrew Sullivan<\/a> and the Huffington Post<\/a> offer very amusing wrap-ups of various reactions from observers on both sides of the aisle, but no one, of any ideological stripe, seemed to think McCain did anything but hurt himself last night.<\/p>\n

Bottom line: McCain has been running on reputation and resume for quite a while. His awkward political skills were easier to mask. But McCain’s difficulties as a candidate are about to get a whole lot more attention, and as of last night, he has a weak pitch, which he’s delivering in a weak way.<\/p>\n

As general election campaign kick offs go, this was an inauspicious start for John McCain. I couldn’t be more pleased.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John McCain, for all of his flaws and troubles, has assembled a professional team of advisors and consultants. Most of them are high-priced lobbyists, which, while raising ethical questions, reminds us that this is a crew that knows how to play to win. And I can probably imagine their thinking going into last night. Barack […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15760","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15760","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15760"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15760\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15760"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15760"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}