Republican National Convention: Day 2

Day 1 was pretty much washed out by Hurricane Gustav.

Day 2 featured an endorsement of John McCain & Sarah Palin by George W. Bush (has he even met Sarah Palin?) along with a speech by Fred Thompson which didn’t get across much information other than the fact that John McCain was a POW 40 years ago and a speech by Joe Lieberman which probably did more to irritate Democrats than to attract them.

The speakers tonight pounded on three themes: “Country First,” POW, & “Maverick.”

The “Country First” theme is likely to be very alienating to independents and Democrats as it gives the impression that one must be a Republican to be patriotic.

The “Country First” theme is also hard to take seriously considering John McCain’s obvious political pandering with his choice of the wildly unqualified Sarah Palin as his VP pick. He clearly didn’t put his “Country First” with that selection. The #1 criteria for a VP should be “Is this person ready to step in and be President at any moment?” With Palin (who has absolutely ZERO foreign policy experience) that is obviously not the case.

Meanwhile the Obama campaign is running a TV ad (watch it below) which makes obvious how ridiculous the “Maverick” tag is. McCain is the same as Bush on all of the major issues and in his own words he admits that he voted with George W. Bush over 90% of the time:

And in Minneapolis Ron Paul’s convention had over 10,000 people in attendance. In comparison to the lack of media coverage for Ron Paul’s convention, I find it very interesting that the media made such a big deal about “disunity” at the Democrat’s convention last week despite the fact that the whole “PUMA” phenomenon is greatly overstated (I believe most “Hillary voters” voting for McCain are the people that Rush Limbaugh set out to vote for Clinton! Yes, they were going to vote for McCain no matter who won.)