I had to give Paul Ryan's big debut at the Republican National Convention a miss due to other commitments, but on Thursday once again I managed to tune in the key events of the evening.
Thursday proved to be far more like a real convention than Tuesday's proceedings. The crowd that listened catatonically to Ann Romney and Chris Christie Tuesday seemed to have been given a jolt of adrenalin two nights later.
First came Clint Eastwood. His rambling statement made a few good points, got off a handful of zingers against Obama, and the crowd seemed to enjoy it. Yet Eastwood himself gave the impression of being dazed and nearly incoherent at times. Well, after all, he is 82 years old, and is a Charlton Heston look-alike at this point, which made him a good match to his audience, and maybe that's why they connected. It seems rare to me to put a movie star, no matter how favorable his opinion, in the speaker line-up on the biggest night of the convention; I wonder how much he had to pay them to allow him to do that.
Marco Rubio, by contrast, is not well known to most Americans, yet he stood out as an excellent, rousing, and articulate speaker. Clearly, he's a man to watch for the future of the Republican Party. He may even be young enough, and nationally unknown enough at this point, to be able to back away gracefully from the extremist tea-party nonsense he's embraced at times. Could he lead the party back to reason and moderation? Perhaps he's already trying; he dwelt mostly on apple-pie themes without edging into Mad-Hatter territory.
And finally, Mitt. Give the man credit for a pretty good speech. Romney plugged away at great length toward his main mission -- to portray himself as something other than a cold automaton. The degree to which he succeeded jprobably depends on the listener's own predisposition, but he gave it a good try. More important, maybe, he managed to rouse the crowd with a standard old stem-winder. positively saturated with predictable applause lines.
It was far lighter on specifics of his plans. He will, for example, create 12 million jobs(!) but doesn't want to tell us how. And it contained many of the tired old falsehoods about the Obama administration (e.g. the "destroying welfare" canard). Maybe that's why he so freqently struck that pose - eyes up and to one side, mouth a little down - that made him look like a kid being confronted by his mom, saying "it wasn't me that broke the vase." (Mom knows better, of course). But truly, political conventions are not designed to deliver fact, and he deserves credit for stirring up "base" enthusiasm. His speech was probably about the best that might be hoped for; now we'll see how many are persuaded by it.