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Date:         Thu, 20 Aug 1992 23:42:00 EDT
From:         more noise please <SWEDE@DRYCAS.BITNET>
Subject:      a conventional final night...

Hm.  Looks like NPR was off in every important respect.  Go figure.

The night opened with Gerald Ford being the first noteable speaker.  He
was angry - so angry he almost showed a second facial expression.  I was
impressed.

Dan Quayle had a solid speech, which firmly planted him in the far right,
maybe not in the same row with Pat Buchanan, but certainly in the same
church.  He had emotion, and he didn't screw up.  A victory, I guess.
He left the specifics for Bush, though.

In 1988, Bush was angry, articulate, and had a brilliant speech.  Today,
he was angry.  He echoed a lot from the other speeches, as if he were trying
to sum up all the catch phrases in one long, long speech (it was 56 minutes
long!  Guess the long wind billows from both candidates).  As with many of
his other speechs, he slid a few actual proposals into the rhetoric, with
few details, the sole thing that set this speech aside from the rest of the
Republican word wrangling:

* Enforcing the spending freeze, promising a veto if Congress tries to break
  it
* a checkbox idea for tax forms, so that 10% of income might go solely towards
  deficit (or maybe debt) reduction
* the chicken approach to budget making: for every dollar borrowed, the debt
  ceiling will be lowered
* after admitting he made a mistake by acquiesing to allowing a tax increase,
  he said he'd propose a tax cut, with adjoining spending cuts
* extending the paperwork and regulation freeze for another year
* taking on the lawyers in a tag team match
* extending health coverage to the poorest of the poor

And yes, those *were* the specifics, or at least as specific as Bush would get.

Bush finished up by alluding to Harry Truman, as he did when he gave a breif
talk to conventioneers on Monday.  If I may be so bold as to step away from
mere fashion criticism for a second, perhaps he should remember another often-
quoted phrase of Truman's: "The Buck Stops Here."

Was it a home run?  No.  A triple, maybe, like Clinton's speech.  Unfortunately
for him, it seems to be too little, too late.  We'll know in the next few
days just how much of a bounce Bush will get from the convention.  The latest
news is that Clinton's lead is down to 11, although he still has 51% (Bush
increased to 40%, according to the ABC poll of Tues/Wed).  So mebbe nobody
blew it.  You can still expect the numbers for Bush to settle, probably to
a 15 point lead for Clinton, closer than my underestimation of earlier this
week.

So, just 33 days to the next big event, the first 'debate'.  From the center
of the universe, this is one of your POLITICS correspondents, me, signing off
and heading to the tub.

Gary W. Olson                 "Now don't protest your innocence,
SWEDE@DRYCAS.CLUB.CC.CMU.EDU   only the dead get off scott free.
75 days and counting down...   And when the judge says 'Whodunit?'
                               You'll be crying 'Not me! Not me!'"
                              - Warren Zevon, "The Long Arm of the Law"
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