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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (82013)	9/4/2008 9:51:19 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 542042

"I continue to be mystified by the Sarah Palin love-fest and the Sarah Palin hate-fest. Clearly, she’s touched a nerve with the conservative grassroots and set off at least some lefty bloggers and commentators. To my mind this doesn’t change anything. But then, I wasn’t the target audience for this move. McCain is still McCain, and the GOP is still the GOP. Daniel Larison and Jim Henley elaborate. I am surprised to see so many paleo-cons, “crunchy” cons, etc. warm up to the McCain-Palin ticket. Palin is “one of us,” I’ve seen people say. And the attacks on her (though exaggerated in my view), simply show the disdain that the “liberal elites” have for “real” Americans. Never mind John McCain’s horrible (from their perspective) positions on everything from Iraq to immigration. As someone who had hopes that a cross-ideological common ground could be found between more traditionalist conservatives and some elements of the left on issues like war, civil liberties, executive power, the environment, and a sustainable ecomomy, this is a bit dispiriting.* But maybe that was always an exaggerated hope anyway. Maybe this just shows that cultural issues still run deeper than most anything else. —————————————— *Not that there aren’t good reasons to mistrust the Dems on these issues too." thinkingreed.wordpress.com

To: Lane3 who wrote (82013)	9/4/2008 10:17:34 AM
From: Sam	Respond to of 542042

he makes good points. Although I'm afraid he is crying in the wilderness--speechwriting for politicians has been going on for a long long time. Augustine was a speechwriter for the Emperor of Rome back in the 4th century, although after a few years he became disgusted by the fact that he was writing speeches he didn't himself believe in for a guy who delivered them without believing what he said to an audience who applauded words they only partially listened to and didn't believe anyway. It had all became a senseless mummery for him, and he quit, eventually becoming a Christian and, of course, a Bishop, philosopher and prolific writer. Can voters this year be sure they learned something about the real Sarah Palin from her GOP vice presidential nomination acceptance speech last night, considering news that it was originally written by speechwriter Matthew Scully over a week ago for an unknown male nominee? The commissioned draft was subsequently customized by Palin and a team of McCain staffers in the 48 hours leading up to its presentation. That is exactly how I thought the speech came about. Except I suspect that Scully wasn't singlehandedly responsible for the basic text. He likely brainstormed with a few other likeminded clever GOPs to come up with what points they wanted to attack Obama on and praise McCain, then invented clever one-liners around their points.

To: Lane3 who wrote (82013)	9/4/2008 11:33:47 AM
From: Rambi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542042

That's why I was struck when I came across the quote from Jon Favreau, Obama's favorite writer, who said that Obama is the chief writer of his own speeches. We know that Obama is there IN his speech. A couple of excerpts from a Newsweek article about him: Jon Favreau has the worst and the best job in political speechwriting. His boss is a best-selling author who doesn't really need his help, having written the 2004 speech that catapulted him onto the national stage. At the same time, the same boss also happens to be capable of delivering a speech in ways that can give his audience the goosebumps. Favreau and Obama rapidly found a relatively direct way to work with each other. "What I do is to sit with him for half an hour," Favreau explains. "He talks and I type everything he says. I reshape it, I write. He writes, he reshapes it. That's how we get a finished product. "It's a great way to write speeches. A lot of times, you write something, you hand it in, it gets hacked by advisers, it gets to the candidate and then it gets sent back to you. This is a much more intimate way to work." Some speeches are much more the product of the candidate himself. Obama e-mailed Favreau his draft of his announcement speech in Springfield, Ill., at 4 a.m. on the morning of the campaign launch last February.

To: Lane3 who wrote (82013)	9/4/2008 11:42:12 AM
From: Rambi	Respond to of 542042

No, the first thing I said to Dan was that they had worked on her voice. It was pitched lower and had lost some of the twanginess. Every once in a while it would start up toward the ends of sentences as she got into what she ws saying, and she would lower it. This was a well-rehearsed performance. Really that's about all you can glean from it, is that she is good at reading well. But for many, that's all they wanted. As several analysts said yesterday, the bar was set low. I think Ben Stein said something about heck, she can walk, she can read. That's about all she needs to do.