Kerry’s speech
I saw it the other night, and one thing that struck me was the reaction of the weblogs/pundits/talking heads the next day. It seemed… all over the place. Some people were saying one thing, others were saying something else, but the responses I read didn’t seem to follow any pattern. Some dems liked it, some didn’t, some republicans liked it, some didn’t. Brokaw called it a “strong speech by a strong candidate”, Jeff Jarvis called it merely competent, Virginia Postrel said it was preaching to the choir instead of reaching out to swing voters (and it reminded her of why she isn’t voting for Kerry). See also this list of responses to the speech from various media luminaries (and not so luminaries).
Matt Welch says you can’t pin down and define the ideal speech to give before a national audience because America is so diverse that there is no such thing as a “typical” American. I’ll agree with that.
Yet there did appear to be some consensus about some of the other speeches at the DNC. Most of the responses I’ve seen to Clinton’s speech on Monday, and Barak Obama’s speech on Tuesday were positive, even if the person didn’t agree with the things Clinton and/or Obama was saying. As far as I can see, there’s no such consensus about Kerry’s speech, whether it was good or bad.
I think the speech was pretty good; it had some real meat and potatoes Democrat talking points in it. It seems like it would be inspiring and base-firing if one agreed with some of the points and assumptions he made. He provided the opposition a lot of things to make fun of though. I could hear Republicans cackling with glee across the country when Mr. “I actually voted for the 87 billion dollars before I voted against it” Kerry said that under a Kerry presidency, America would never again “fight a war on the cheap”, and force parents to “take up a collection” to buy body armor for their sons and daughters in the military.
What it all boils down to I think is that the speech was nebulous enough that people could read whatever they wanted into it. Pro-Kerry folks thought it was great, anti-Kerry folks can’t see how anyone would vote for such a dissembler. We’ll see how helpful the speech really was to him in the coming months, I suppose.