Wednesday, September 05, 2012

2012 Democratic National Convention: Night 1

What a wonderful night of amazing speeches that have me fired up for the election in November.

The best speeches in my opinion in order of when they were delivered:
Ted Strickland, former Ohio Governor and a 1980 graduate of the University of Kentucky
Deval Patrick, current Governor of Massachusetts (term expires in 2016)
Martin O'Malley, current Governor of Maryland (To be fair, he had the tough act of following Gov. Patrick's passionate speech)
Julian Castro, current Mayor of San Antonio
Michelle Obama, First Lady of the United States of America

The First Lady's was not just powerful but personal. The Obamas are just as human as the rest of us are. She really killed it tonight.

Joe Kennedy III did a great job talking about his uncle, Ted Kennedy, before the moving video tribute that followed.

Rahm Emanuel, the Mayor of Chicago and former presidential chief of staff, spoke this evening and did a good job. It was not anywhere as close to the big speeches or even the most passionate speeches of the evening.

Former Congressman Robert Wexler spoke about Israel. Someone had to do it, right?

Families like the Lihns would suffer if the health care law were to be repealed.

Overall, there were more mentions of Mitt Romney tonight than during the entire RNC if Twitter and convention analysis is to be believed. Heck, there was more diversity this evening than during the four nights in Tampa.

Thank you, C-SPAN, for offering a library of convention speeches from this week in Charlotte. Transcripts are not yet up anywhere.

I started out by watching MSNBC at 7 PM but once I realized that they would offer more commentating than speeches, I soon turned it over to C-SPAN, which is not offered in HD by Insight. That said, I did flip back but only after the Kennedy video tribute when Andrea Mitchell tweeted that she would be interviewing Ted Kennedy, Jr. and Patrick Kennedy. After that, it was back to C-SPAN until after Governor O'Malley's address to the delegates. He was supposed to speak for 5 minutes but ended up speaking for closer to 9 minutes. After that, it was back over to MSNBC until probably close to 1 AM following Hardball with Chris Matthews.

The sad thing was that tonight was only the first night and it brought the house down. That's without President Clinton, Vice President Biden, or President Obama speaking.

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