The Spin Cycle -- RNC style

I didn't watch as much of the RNC as I did the DNC -- a bit of convention fatigue plus the abbreviated schedule -- but I did catch the speeches by both Sarah Palin and John McCain. I give Palin credit for the excellent delivery of a ho-hum speech and McCain demerits for the mediocre delivery of a better speech.

Palin certainly knows how to charm a room. She pauses naturally for the laugh and applause lines, knows when to wink or smile to reinforce a point, and chums the water with base bait like a pro (then again, she once was a commercial fisherwoman). She did smile too much, as did McCain though in her case I chalk that up to those years of beauty pageant training. When you are making a serious case, you need a serious face.

When she spoke about her own story, she was compelling. When she launched into distortions of Obama's stated positions and other partisan mud-slinging, she lost me entirely. I heard the "red meat" but had to ask: Where's the beef? The speech was extraordinarily light on concrete policy recommendations or other substantive material.

McCain is not a natural speech maker and it shows. His speech was well-crafted -- especially when he took his own party to task in order to reburnish his credentials as a maverick. But for too much of the speech, he would deliver a line and then smile like a kid who had made it successfully through a difficult fingering exercise on the piano.

When he spoke about his past and about his desire to change Washington, he was compelling. The blatant pandering to the party base and his distortions of Obama's positions were also awkward and off-putting. He didn't feel comfortable in his own skin while he was doing it.

Of course so much of the conventions is about spin and counterspin. It matters less what the candidates say than how it is interpretted by the pundits afterwards. Palin's selection had several Republican spokespeople spinning in reverse as you'll see in this brilliant video montage from The Daily Show.