WASHINGTON: Folks, hold on to your hats. This is going to be one hell of a race until Americans elect their next president on Nov. 4.
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech as Sen. John McCain’s vice presidential running mate on Wednesday night gave an instant jolt of energy to a political party that has been mainly lackluster for much of 2008.
Palin provided the electricity that many delegates in St. Paul, Minnesota, said was needed to move the convention off the false start earlier this week that resulted from Hurricane Gustav’s landfall in the Gulf Coast.
Palin’s 44-minute speech, in which she slammed Democratic nominee Barack Obama while also offering a vision of McCain as a reform-minded man of the people, injected the extra energy to stir up convention-goers, many delegates said.
“The enthusiasm was absolutely palpable,” said Bill Stone, who was attending with his wife Judith from Burlington, Wis. “The expectations were high and she really surpassed them.”
In introducing herself to the Republican National Convention, and to Americans through prime-time TV, she cast herself as a family-centered public servant from small-town America who will help Republican presidential nominee John McCain vanquish the Democrats and bring change to Washington.
Palin skewered Obama and the news media as members of a “Washington elite’’ that she had no interest in joining.
“I’m going to Washington to serve the people of this great country,” Palin said. “Americans expect us to go to Washington for the right reasons, and not just to mingle with the right people.’’
Palin’s speech may have been the most anticipated of the convention, which was shortened by almost a full day because of Hurricane Gustav.
She is seeking to dispel questions about her qualifications and self-described status as a reformer that have swirled since she became McCain’s running mate on Aug. 29.
In her more hostile moments, and there were many, she went on the attack against Obama and his vice presidential choice, Joe Biden.
Her use of sarcasm was crudely effective, as when she scoffed that “the American presidency is not supposed to be a journey of personal discovery,” a mocking reference to the lofty oratory in which Obama specializes.
John McCain took the stage last night to accept the Republican presidential nomination, buoyed by a newly energized convention fueled in no small part by Palin’s roundly praised speech the night before. But McCain had a different bar to cross than Palin in his prime-time address to the nation — promoting himself as the best candidate at the top of the ticket and appealing to crossover voters wowed by a high-impact Democratic convention a week earlier. Just as luck was not on his side for the RNC’s opening night with Hurricane Gustav grabbing much of the media spotlight, the RNC’s closing night, with a keynote by John McCain, faced stiff competition from the National Football League’s season opener between the Washington Redskins and the New York Giants. But the more difficult challenge for McCain in the next two months until election day is to recalibrate the central message of his campaign and line of attack against Obama. McCain wants to recast the Republican Party’s brand in his own maverick image, staking his claim to the presidency in an attempt to overcome what he paints as his opponent’s more ephemeral call for change. Unlike the Democrats, the RNC is, well, mostly made up of white folks. This, observers say, is evidence of what many Republicans consider one of their party’s biggest shortcomings.
Only 36 of the 2,380 delegates seated on the Republican’s convention floor are black, the lowest number since the groups began tracking diversity at political conventions 40 years ago.
Specifically, this means 93 percent of the Republican delegates are white, 5 percent Hispanic and 2 percent black. The Democratic National Convention was 65 percent white, 23 percent black and 11 percent Hispanic.
