As I write this, it’s t-minus two hours to Republican Presidential nominee Sen. John McCain’s acceptance speech at the Republican convention — and it’s interesting surfing some of the Democratic sites. Some are wondering if there is another shoe to drop.
For instance, Democratic consultant Joe Trippi thinks McCain has learned from Sen. Hillary Clinton’s mistake of running on experience but not stressing enough her potential role as an agent of significant change. And what will happen? Trippi writes:
After nearly a year the Clinton campaign started to stress change as well and began to turn things around, but it was too late.
The McCain campaign is trying to make the same turn — tougher to do when you are running as the nominee of the party that has held the White House for the last 8 years — particularly when your party’s current occupant of the White House is as unpopular as George Bush.
What I do expect tonight is for the gambler in John McCain to press his case with another bold stroke. I will be surprised if there isn’t some policy surprise, or some challenge to Obama aimed at putting the Democratic nominee on the defensive included in his acceptance speech.
If so, it wouldn’t be a surprise. The biggest problem for Democrats is that, all too often during the campaign, Obama & Co have been on the defensive with McCain setting the debate and dominating news cycles with a controversial, news-grabbing ad or a bit of provocative rhetoric. Tonight he’ll have a huge audience. Will it be a perfunctory but compelling speech or, as Trippi suggests, contain a bit more?
It’s less than t-minus two…
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.