The funny thing about Katie Britt is that she’s delivering her speech tonight in pretty much exactly the same tone – or close – that she delivered her State of the Union response with. That was one of the most memorably cringeworthy performances in recent years, whereas this speech sounds just fine. In fact, I now understand what Britt’s defenders said at the time about her actually being a perfectly cromulent public speaker.
What works in a hall as a speech in front of an audience plays very differently in front of a cold camera alone in a room.
Katie Britt comes out with the perky persona she had in her Senate campaign, not the overdramatic weepy tone she used in her much-maligned State of the Union response. She segues into a bit of the latter as she goes, but so far, she’s more winsome this way.
It’s easy as a political writer to focus on the speeches, but the video ads on the price of gas and groceries were very powerful and probably a lot more effective.
I’m trying to do something practically impossible at this advanced age: watch the convention and see how I would think about it not as a jaded National Review writer, but as a normie, or at least as close to a normie as I’m capable of imagining. (Weren’t we all normies, once upon a time? I grew up watching convention coverage religiously, which I suppose disqualifies me off the bat.)
And even though the exercise seems less important than ever in an era where media choices are completely atomized and parties are ideologically polarized — everybody’s tuned out and they already made their minds up anyway — I still enjoy assessing the vibe. It gives you a sense how the campaign dominoes will eventually fall. I could tell immediately from the 2008 GOP convention in Minneapolis/St. Paul that John McCain was snakebitten and doomed. I was not wrong, though it actually turned out worse than even I expected. So I freely admit that for the next few days, as far as the RNC is concerned, I will be little better than NR’s “Vibe Check” dunce. I think it’s healthy to approach a ritual I am otherwise overfamiliar with not as That Guy Who’s Avowedly Skeptical of Trump, but more as That Guy Who Wonders How It’ll All Play.
Day One doesn’t look to be terribly interesting – nor was it intended to be, in terms of scheduling, the real news having been made with Trump’s selection of J. D. Vance as his VP. So far, the Republicans survived a Marjorie Taylor-Greene speech without major embarrassment, so the first major hurdle has been cleared. Beyond that, the optics are focused on Trump’s black outreach — Mark Robinson, Wes Hunt, John James) – and have been crisply professional and a reasonable mixture of angry (at the Biden admin) and upbeat.
Congressman John James notes that he, a combat veteran, shares an important trait with Donald Trump: “The bad guys shot at us both, but they missed.” It’s an interesting attempt to maximize the political effect of the attempt on Trump’s life, though one might also say that it lends the former president unearned valor.
James: Under Trump, we had an economy so good, Democrats tried to give Obama credit for it.
That’s a good line.
John James gives a shoutout to the Detroit Lions, which seems a little too on the nose for a gathering of Republican politicians.
True that Trump has conquered the room. But this convention cannot afford to assume he has conquered the general electorate.
The major difference from the 2016 convention to now is already apparent. In 2016, the party had to sell a lot of people in the room on Trump. Now it’s much more of a pro-Trump rally because he has totally conquered the party. This was already going to be the case, but surviving the assassination took things to a new level.
Mark Robinson gives a tough speech but not a bomb-throwing one. Slams NAFTA. Calls Trump “the Braveheart of our time,” which suggests perhaps he didn’t watch the movie all the way to the end.