Well, that was a good speech for Chris Christie, wasn't it?
That was kind of shocking, actually. Of course he mentioned Mitt Romney. A good whopping five or six times. But it sure took him a while. Rachel Maddow just said this was a 2,600-word speech in which he didn't mention Romney until 1,800 words in. And as soon as he mentioned Romney, he went back to talking about himself.
I know I'm not Mr. Objective here, but this night didn't seem good to me at all. John Kasich spoke about Ohio. Scott Walker spoke about Wisconsin. Rick Santorum spoke about his family. Ann Romney talked about her husband, but as I said below, in general and vague ways that I don't think gave people at home a strong sense of the man.
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Christie's speech was also very combative, and kind of nasty. I thought the big selling point of Christie was his humor. There was a little bit of that at the beginning, but he completely dropped it. And while the speech included some good whacks at Democrats, it didn't add up to much of a vision, either a party vision or a Romney vision.
Not a positive night. Maybe not a disaster. But the clear message that emerges from this night is that we have a party here that hardly wants to talk about its nominee. Did you see Romney's face when the camera flashed over to him? He was looking at him like, "What are you doing, dude"? Or maybe, "What was my staff doing approving this script?"
I bet there's some furious rewriting going on of Wednesday's speeches. If there's not, if Mitt Romney isn't pissed off after tonight, there's really something more wrong with the guy than I thought.
