Underwhelmed, for the most part, with today's convention speeches. Barak Obama, US Senate candidate from Illinois, was very good, not as good as Clinton or even Edwards, but still very good. Ron Reagan's speech on stem cell research was an interesting change of pace, but no one in America watched it.
Andrew Sullivan said it best yesterday:
I think [Bill Clinton] was better last night than at either of his own conventions and certainly better than any of his SOTUs. He performed a brilliant rhetorical trick: he deployed the usual canards used against him to buttress Kerry. Rather than attack the wealthy as recjpients of tax cuts, he attacked himself as a now-wealthy man. And then the coup de grace: he put himself and Bush in the same camp as draft-dodgers, in stark comparison to the patriotic Kerry! My jaw was on the floor at that point in a mixture of admiration and horror. But it was mighty effective. And the way in which he described the cost of the tax cut in terms of squandered attempts to improve homeland defense was another smart move. Use the Republican tax cut issue against the Republican security issue. Wedge against them for once. If the constitution didn't prevent it, the man would still be president. After last night's speech, you can see why.
