The network television cameras naturally followed the commotion in the stands as Sen. John McCain began his acceptance speech Thursday. As protesters momentarily disrupted the proceedings, conventioneers drowned them out by chanting, “USA, USA.”
At the center of the hall, McCain ad libbed, “Don’t be diverted by the ground noise and the static.” That could be the voters’ motto for the coming two months.
Yet the noise and static provided by the analysts, commentators and pundits Thursday was largely positive.
“Last night, Sarah Palin reached out to the base. Today it was about reaching out to the middle — very different constituencies between last night and today,” observed CNN’s Candy Crowley. She noted McCain was talking to the TV lens, not the convention hall, in his address.
“You could see the passion flowing through his veins,” ABC’s George Stephanopoulos gushed.
On NBC, Tom Brokaw saw “a humble, grateful and wiser man at 72, a healer.”
Jeff Greenfield on CBS took McCain’s repetition of the word “fight” to mean “I’m not too old.” He found much of the speech “surprisingly familiar.” His colleague Bob Schieffer reacted more positively, saying, “the Republicans are more unified than I thought they would be.”
NBC’s Chuck Todd found the speech “as non-ideological as a Republican could give,” noting there were very few barbs at Obama.
Fox News’ Brit Hume called the changing photo backdrop “alarming.” His Fox colleague Karl Rove noted there were 67 paragraphs in the speech, 19 devoted to kitchen-table issues, 11 biographical, eight about foreign policy, six about reform, six about Obama.
Vamping before the speech on MSNBC, Chris Matthews observed that “the Iraq war remains the leitmotif of this campaign. The world sees Obama as a war critic, McCain a war veteran.”
Pitching the storyline forward to television’s next big political ratings-grabbers, Matthews said, “I do think we’ll see this come to the fore in the debates.”
Set the TiVo: The first debate is slated for Sept. 26 at the University of Mississippi.
Joanne Ostrow: 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com
