Vicious Rants of an Angry Yellow Man

So the Republican convention is now over. I have not seen any new polls out yet, so it is hard to say what effect the convention had on the voters. Most of the time a convention gives its candidate a boost for a short period of time. I would expect that to be the case of here and then after the Democratic convention we will probably be at the same level again. This is going down to the wire for sure!

I think Ann Romney did her job the best among the speakers. She was supposed to make Mitt more likeable and I think she did that. Chris Christie fired away as expected but I don't think he did a good job for Romney. First of all he spent most of the first half of his speech talking about himself as if he is angling for 2016 already. After Ann had talked about love, Christie went on about wanting respect rather that love. This kind of cancel each other on Tuesday. Paul Ryan fired up the base and acted as the pit bull as expected. He had lots of inaccuracies as pointed out by neutral pundits such as Medicare cut backs and unemployment rate. So overall I think he was only B or B+ as best. Romney did all right but did not hit a home run as the Republicans claimed. He had nothing specific to say and I think he wasted time in the beginning introducing himself which others, especially Ann, had done for him already. He also started late and ran late thanks to Clint Eastwood.

Speaking of Eastwood, how did he aged so fast? This can't be the Dirty Harry we used to love! His effort of being a comedian was as successful as Jackie Chan would have trying to do romance. Was it not 6 months or so ago that Republicans were complaining that Eastwood was doing a commercial for Obama on the Super Bowl? Now we can see how paranoid they are given Eastwood is such a staunch conservative. On the other hand, if you are a conspiracy theorist, you may say that Eastwood did it on purpose to screw up Romney's big night. In that case, you would also have to say that the Romney campaign was not very good in not screening Eastwood to make sure he is not Dirty!

Now about minorities in the party. They did wheel out Rubio and Rice. I missed their speeches. I will assume they did well. But Rubio can only help with the Cuban vote which Romney already has. As I said before, he would not help with other Latinos, especially Mexicans who are different politically than Cubans. Before Rice spoke, a Republican analyst on CNN said that Rice proves to the country that the Republicans are not all white country club people. Well, Rice just got into Augusta, her expertise is Russian history, she played tennis and the piano, she was also a figure skater. I don't know if you can get any more white country club than her!

The convention is not just speeches. One of the most important thing that is done is voting for a party platform. This seems to be hidden out of sight. Nobody talked about it on tv. A reporter from the local paper (not LA Times) wrote about some of it. I don't have time to check if all of these are true but some are obviously true. Like against abortion without exception even in case of rape or save the life of the mother, same stand as Todd Akin. Some members have proudly call this the most conservative platform in history. It is so out of touch with majority of Americans that the Republican national chairman had to say that this is the party platform, not Romney's platform. This makes it important to ask: what parts of the platform is Romney against? Voters have the right to know? This should be asked by the Democrats next week. Also should be asked: Having said what he did not like about Obama's policies, what policies of Bush does Romney like or dislike?

Now it is the Democrats' turn. I am sure I will find things to criticize next week. On thing I can predict: that they will not send out an aging Hollywood star to speak without an approved script.