McCain Didn’t Go to the Bench for RNC Speech
A reader over at TPM speculates: Whatever you think of the Palin speech, whether it was cynical or alienating to anyone outside the base, it was solidly
Jul 31, 2020131.3K Shares1.7M Views
“„Whatever you think of the [Alaska Gov. Sarah] Palin speech, whether it was cynical or alienating to anyone outside the base, it was solidly written. I’d even say well written. [Sen. John] McCain’s wasn’t. It was decidedly second rate, not just badly delivered but clumsily written (except for the part about his POW experience, which I assume he has on file: that worked). How did that happen? Everyone knows McCain is a bad public speaker, so one would assume his campaign would it least give him a rock solid text to work from. But I suspect the campaign only has so many first-rate people on hand, and all of those people in the McCain campaign were tasked with taking care of Palin, leaving the top of the ticket to the second-stringers.
I can speak to this a little bit.
Meanwhile, Mark Salter — McCain’s personal speech-writer, adviser, friend and biographer — has been working on the GOP presidential nominee’s speech for weeks. I’ve heard him say so. I don’t think anyone would refer to Salter as a “second-string” anything in the campaign. I can’t say why the finished product seemed so “second-rate,” but McCain definitely had his No. 1 guy working on it for a very long time. I guess they can’t all be home runs, or “hat tricks” to use Palin’s preferred analogy.
Rhyley Carney
Reviewer
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