Convention Acceptance Speeches

Sorry for the delay in getting a new post up, but the whole family has been under the weather recently.  I have a few topics to cover, so you can expect more soon, but for now let’s touch on the most topical.  I’ve now watched both Obama’s and McCain’s acceptance speeches and thought I’d give some feedback.

First up was Obama last week.  I’ve liked Obama for a while, but have never been really excited about him.  My first choice for the Democratic ticket would have been Biden.  He never really got any traction, so I backed Hillary in the primaries early on.  She started to lose me when she really started to go negative against Obama, but by that point I’d already voted for her.  So, while I’ve been supporting Obama for a while now, it’s been more of a default stance than an excited one.  However, after listening to his acceptance speech you can now put me in the excited column.  He took it to the Republican party in a way I wish Gore and Kerry had.  He talked about what was wrong (though not all… hello torture?) with the current administration and what he would do to fix things.  It’s one of the best political speeches I’ve ever heard.

Last night we had McCain.  Granted, he’s not the greatest of speech givers, so I had low expectations going in, but my reaction really surprised me.  Given the stances he takes, I expected to be really angry about the speech, but it was even worse… I WAS BORED!  Dear god, how I was bored.  My eyes started to glaze over at the same old tired rhetoric the Republicans have been using for years.  It was really hard to not just drift away and think about something more exciting, like cutting my fingernails.  If had been straddling the fence about whom to vote for (and admittedly I wasn’t), I can’t imagine McCain’s speech convincing me of anything besides the fact he was going to keel over soon.  That would leave us with Palin which sends a shiver down my spine.

So, to sum up, Obama was inspirational, McCain was tired.  Obama was engrossing, McCain was boring.  I don’t like being bored.

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