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.

An Energy Policy, Please

Thank you to the New York Times for today's "Energy Fictions" op-ed piece. Both McCain and Obama are doing disservice to the energy issues before us. The blathering about thumbs up or down on offshore drilling, proposed windfall profits taxes, proper tire pressure, and the rest just nibble at the edges. These are tactics when what we should be talking about is an energy policy. We need to move the focus off of the price of gas this week or next and talk about what we're going be doing for the next 10 to 20 years.

It's sad when Paris Hilton offers the most coherent take on an energy policy.


First, we don't need energy independence. We don't have food independence or clothing independence. What we need is strategic interdepedence. We don't need to stop importing oil from Canada or Mexico -- they are our friends and neighbors. We need a broad, unbiased look at all of our energy options from solar to nuclear. We need investment in basic science that can help fuel the growth of a world-class alternative energy industry. We need a President who will craft and implement an energy policy that panders neither to Big Oil or the most strident environmentalists.

We're going to have to blend energy sources to meet our needs. We consume a lot of energy and we have increasing competition for fossil fuel resources from China, India, and other emerging economies. We need to get as serious as Finland (yes, Finland) in facing this critical challenge that will have such impact on individuals and businesses across the country.

Social Enterprise Presidential Debate

The social entrepreneurs I've met in the U.S. are among the most innovative, passionate, and thougthful people in the country. They are in touch with many of the pressing social and environmental challenges that will face the next president.

I would like to propose an on-line debate among the presidential candidates moderated by and with questions posed by social entrepreneurs. It can be online -- let's keep the carbon footprint small, the reach large, and the time impact on the candidates' schedules minimal.

And if the candidates themselves won't make time for us, let's take surrogates for the candidates. It might actually make it a bit easier to focus on the issues rather than the personalities.

For McCain, Romney, Huckabee and Paul it would be a chance to engage with the entrepreneurs they continually celebrate in their speeches. SEs are (often) providing free market solutions to societal challenges. For Clinton and Obama it would be a chance to engage with a group driven to address the problems of poverty, hunger, health, environmental degradation, and other issues that they say are at the heart of their campaigns.

For all of us, it would be a chance to get beyond the usual questions and canned answers that everyone must be tired of by now (Wolff Blitzer was still asking Hillary to declare her Iraq war vote a mistake -- no matter how you feel about the vote, you know she's responded to this about a million times so far).

Join me. Let's pressure the campaigns to address social entrepreneurship.