McCain speech falls flat

The pundits seem to be relatively agreed that McCain's speech last night was decidedly underwelming. Yes, some good stuff on foreign policy/defence but generally a very flat delivery.

The Huffington Post has this list of stories which says it all:

Watch, Read Speech... Former Bush Speechwriter: "Pretty Disappointing"... National Review: "Flat, Forced"... David Gergen: "Mostly A Rerun Of A Lot Of Old Republican Ideas"... New Republic: "No Overarching Themes"... CNN'S Jeffrey Toobin: Worst Speech By Nominee Since Jimmy Carter In 1980... NY Times Blog: Some Delegates Fell Asleep... WATCH: Speech Interrupted By Iraq Vet Heckler

Time's Joe Klein sums it up:

More a valedictory than an acceptance speech -- more the end of a career than the beginning of a presidency.

Amongst a summary on Daily Kos, Tom Shales of the Washington Post is quoted:

It's like staging a revolution against yourself -- saying that the Republicans have got to go so the Republicans can move in and clean up the mess.
"John McCain was re-branding his party as the party of change," one CNN commentator said after the speech. "Re-branding" is a very popular term these days, but what does it mean? Perhaps that you can make something true just by saying it's true.

DemfromCT on Daily Kos tickled my fancy with this:

Set speeches are just not his thing. His strengths lie elsewhere, mostly in an artificial image of a maverick, which really means everyone who's an establishment Republican in DC now despises him even more than they used to after this convention.

Why should that be? Because McCain is openly running against them. Does that mean he's really not Bush II? Of course not. With the pick of Sarah Palin, McCain's told the world he's more conservative than anyone feared, and if he wins, he'll do everything he can to appoint Supreme Court justices in the mold of Scalia and Thomas, overturn Roe v Wade and restart the culture wars and re-fight the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, and by the sound of the speech last night any other war he can get his hands on.