Her speech was well-delivered, as I figured it would be. Much more cutting than I thought it would be. And breathtakingly dishonest to boot. Obama's never authored a bill? Never done anything about nukes? Wants to raise taxes on the middle class (this is implied)? McCain never changes what he says when he's in front of a specific audience? (Okay, that was the funniest line of the night for me.) Etc., etc. For a woman whose religiousity is one of her defining attributes she's not too big on the whole "thou shalt not bear false witness" deal, and the only defense is that she doesn't know the truth because she's clueless and someone else wrote the speech for her. Ugh.
I doubt it will appeal too much to independents. I'm sure plenty of them tuned in to potentially hear something new and just heard another Republican moaning about taxes and Obama. She's a woman, but the GOP missed a big opportunity to try to make her appeal to moderates/independents. And dissing Harry Reid and the "do-nothing [Democratic] senate" goes down not as smoothly after yesterday's "Mr. Bipartisan" speech from Joe Lieberman, no?
Before her speech, I guess I had figured that Palin was the true-believer evangelical mom (not unlike my mom) that I encountered many times during my childhood. I don't think that's true anymore. She reminds me far more of the moms who would earnestly lecture you about Christian values (and the terrible liberals eroding them!) but who you then hear are cheating on their husbands. Not that I'm implying that Governor Palin is doing any such thing, but the hypocrisy is the same. A Christian woman who has such capacity for lying is something else. I've decided I don't like her all that much, though I suspect that the point of her speech was to make people like me dislike her.
As for the convention in general, this post sums up my thoughts well. Where's the overarching theme? The Dems had two at least: Barack Obama will fix the economy the Republicans screwed up, and John McCain = George Bush. The GOP approach seems scattershot, and the only themes seem to be that John McCain was a POW and that Obama is bad. I'm sorry, but at this point people just aren't going to be swayed by these things.
