The Republican Dilemna: Doing Well Isn't Good Enough

I'm so biased against the Republican Party that I'm probably a poor judge of whether Tuesday night was effective for them or not.

But I think the Republicans have two problems in putting on a convention.

Credible Spokespeople? Most importantly, many prominent Republicans are no longer credible spokespeople for the Republican Party.

That certainly is the case with the Bush administration. George Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Condoleeza Rice, and others have become such powerful symbols of failure and incompetence that they would always be a negative no matter what they said.

The point also applies to prominent Republicans like Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, and Mitt Romney. They all performed poorly as presidential candidates during the primaries and their reputations for corruption (Giuliani), laziness (Thompson), and phoniness (Romney) stick with them even though the primaries have long been over.

Fred Thompson was the featured speaker tonight. In many ways, Thompson gave a rousing Republican speech. I rather think that Thompson's account of McCain's imprisonment in the Hanoi Hilton went on too long. But Thompson got out an energetic version of Republican talking points about Obama. So the speech was generally effective.

But who outside the most committed conservatives is interested in hearing Fred Thompson give a speech of any kind? Hardly anybody I would guess. Ultimately, Thompson was defeated before he started.

And it didn't help that he was upstaged by Bristol Palin, Levi Johnston, and all the mini-scandals emerging around Sarah Palin.

The Message Problem. The other big problem for the Republicans concerns how they are going to deal with McCain's theme of changing the political culture of Washington. When McCain or Sarah Palin take on the "political establishment," it's always the highly corrupt Republican Party establishment that they're fighting. But Republican speakers can't say that because they're addressing a Republican convention in which corrupt figures like Kentucky's Mitch McConnell are prominent delegates.

In the same way, Republican speakers like Fred Thompson have a hard time being specific about the reform policies that John McCain pursued in his battles against the political establishment. That's because all of McCain's efforts were opposed by Republicans in both the Senate (with Mitch McConnell usually leading the charge) and the House of Representatives. McCain's initiatives on tobacco regulation, campaign finance reform, lobbying reform, and immigration legislation have all been overwhelmingly opposed by Republicans. Fred Thompson and other Republican speakers can't say anything specific about what John McCain did or what he accomplished in any of those areas. As a result, much of Thompson's praise for McCain sounded pretty vague.

The only area where McCain took the lead and Republicans agreed with him was the "surge policy" in Iraq. But Thompson could only lean on that so much.

Overall, Fred Thompson did fairly well. George Bush and Joe Lieberman weren't that bad either. But I thought that their decent efforts still fell kind of flat given that none of the Republican speakers were in a position to really advance John McCain's candidacy.