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It started with Mike Huckabee. He is a performer, he knows how to do this, and he made the audience listen. But he is also a policy person and a veteran campaigner who knows the base. He addressed the Mormon issue without ever saying "the Mormon issue," and he hit hard on cultural issues. President Obama, he said, is the only "self-professed evangelical" in the race, yet "he tells people of faith that they have to bow their knees to the god of government and violate their faith and conscience in order to comply with what he calls health care. Friends . . . let me say it as clearly as possible, that the attack on my Catholic brothers and sisters is an attack on me."
That was electric. Every speaker afterwards got to bounce off the energy Mr. Huckabee left in the room.
Condi Rice was a star. She took the role of accomplished and knowledgable public instructor, boiling down the conservative critique of Mr. Obama's foreign policy. What are they upset about? That he's not serious, that he doesn't understand what America must be in the world. The great unanswered question now is where America stands. When the world doesn't know, it becomes "a more chaotic and dangerous place." Interestingly, she scored the president on international economic policy. We are "abandoning the playing field" on trade, "and it will come back to haunt us."
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New Mexico Gov. Susan Martinez was a revelation. I'd never seen her speak. She came across as tough, funny, able, smart. She's like the prosecutor in a show with a name like "CSI: Child Victims Unit"—the no-nonsense Latina who tells the detectives to make the call and get the perp. She did something Republicans love, telling the story of how she once went to lunch to hear some political guys out and realized at the end, to her shock, that she was a Republican. It was like Arnold Schwarzenegger at the 2004 convention. He told of being new in America. He saw Richard Nixon talking about free enterprise and asked a friend, "What party is he?" On being told, he said, "Then I am a Republican." The only line in 2004 that brought down the house.
Anyway, watch this woman. She's a star, too.
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The most important speech Wednesday was Paul Ryan's. America was meeting him. I won't quote at length, since it's all over the Internet and you already know the lines that scored—the college kid and the Obama poster, the elevator music. Great stuff.
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Night three was good in different ways. The Friends of Mitt who showed up to speak for him painted a better picture of his personal virtues than has ever been painted. The Romney family film was beautiful and touching. Clint Eastwood was funny, endearing—"Oprah was crying"—and carries his own kind of cultural authority. "It's time for somebody else to come along and solve the problem." He was free-form, interesting—you didn't quite know what was going to come next—strange and, in the end, kind of exhilarating. Talk about icons. The crowd yelling, "Make my day," was one of the great convention moments, ever.
Mitt Romney's speech? The success of the second night of the convention left people less nervous about the stakes. Nobody expected a great one. There was a broad feeling of, "Look, giving great speeches is not what Mitt does, he does other things."
He had to achieve adequacy. He did.
It was a speech that seemed assembled by people who love pictures but not words. And that will limit a speech.
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Noonan was a speech writer for Presidents Reagan and Bush 41. She was one of the best at her craft which adds heft to the critiques she gives here. I agree with her analysis and would also emphasize just how compelling Gov. Martinez is. If she moves to the national stage, Democrats will hate her with the same passion they now focus on Sarah Palin. They will view her as a double apostate to the church of liberalism.
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