Sep 4, 2008 
There’s a lot of excellent commentary about Sarah Palin’s speech on the Web today. A consensus is forming that the speech may have been great for the hall but didn’t reach out to the rest of America. For example, Steve Benen said,
Going into the speech, I expected Palin to try to connect to a mainstream audience, demonstrating competence, credibility, and readiness. She already enjoys the support of the GOP base; Palin has to work on convincing everyone else.
And yet, she (or, more accurately, the McCain campaign aides who wrote her speech) went in a different direction, aiming to shore up the party’s base even more. Instead of seriousness, Palin went for biting and sarcastic partisanship. Instead of presenting herself as a trustworthy leader, Palin proved herself an attack-dog ideologue. Instead of answering questions about readiness, she answered questions about who she hates and how much. Palin not only steered clear of the concerns of swing voters, she practically thumbed her nose at them.
What’s more, Palin did this with a strikingly dishonest speech, filled with the kind of obvious and transparent falsehoods that even half-way knowledgeable observers can debunk off the top of their heads. Palin didn’t just lie, she lied brazenly, as if to say, “I don’t care.”
I wrote in the last post why small-town Americans might not take to Palin as quickly as the GOP seems to assume they will. Probably some will, but some will be turned off by the “mean girl” persona.
Nate at FiveThirtyEight also has some good commentary on why Palin’s speech might have fallen flat with independents:
I think some of you are underestimating the percentage of voters for whom Sarah Palin lacks the standing to make this critique of Barack Obama. To many voters, she is either entirely unknown, or is known as an US Weekly caricature of a woman who eats mooseburgers and has a pregnant daughter. To change someone’s opinion, you have to do one of two things. Either, you have to be a trusted voice of authority, or you have to persuade them. Palin is not a trusted voice of authority — she’s much too new. But neither was this a persuasive speech. It was staccato, insistent, a little corny. It preached to the proverbial choir. It was also, as one of my commentors astutely noted, a speech written by a man and for a man, but delivered by a woman, which produces a certain amount of cognitive dissonance.
The story is that the speech was a generic vice-president speech written before the Palin announcement and then adapted for Palin. If true, I think that’s extremely weird.
This was a very small sample, but the independents on a Detroit Free Press panel were not impressed.
McCain is not a great orator, so expectations for his speech tonight are not high. Even so, what he does with this speech will be telling. In order to reach out to persuadable “swing” voters, IMO he needs to show he understands peoples’ economic concerns and has some idea what he’s going to do to address them. He needs also to persuade listeners that his administration would not be a copy of George Bush’s. I think some vague noises about “reform” and “change” are not going to do that; he needs to call out specifics.
If, on the other hand, he dedicates the bulk of his speech to what a great commander-in-chief he will make but provides little in the way of specific economic ideas, this will be a speech to the base, not the country. Yes, they need to energize the base, but they can’t win with just the base. Surely they know that.
Or maybe they just want to talk to themselves. They’re the only ones who like them.
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I’m watching Howard Fineman on MSNBC. He’s pissed. GOP operatives are trying to intimidate the press into laying off reporting on Palin. He’s really pissed.
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