This has been such an eventful week, I didn't know if I should post here or in the Race for the White House thread. After the actually interesting Democratic convention, I heard yesterday that 38 million people listened to Barack Obama's speech on Thursday night, more than the finale of American Idol or the Olympic opening ceremony. Followed the next day by McCain's choice of Palin. Now the Republican Convention is starting today, but is being truncated because of Hurricane Gustav hitting Louisiana at the same time. Not to be cynical, but this may be a political opportunity for the Republicans, in that George Bush is not going to speak now, which was a risky proposition itself— and the Republicans can try and distill their convention and be sensitive to those on the Gulf Coast at the same time. The hurricane, while obviously a terrible disaster, may be propitious in providing some distraction from Palin's revelation of her daughter's pregnancy, another semi-bombshell, along with the disclosure that she has hired an attorney for the trooper business.
I was watching CNN just now, they had sent a reporter to Alaska to dig into Palin dirt, apparently, and the reporter was relishing it a bit too much. Bill Bennett, one of their "political team" covering the convention, had a fit about her bias, and unfortunately it was rightly so. He pointed to Obama's statements about the matter, which really were about perfect:
This shouldn't be part of our politics, it has no relevance to Governor Palin's performance as a governor or her potential performance as a vice president, and so I would strongly urge people to back off these kinds of stories.
Of course, that doesn't mean that nobody will think about it.
I'm very interested to see how the Republican convention goes now. |