I remember watching the 1992 Republican Convention in my parents’ living room. I was back on the East Coast for a summer visit, and I was completely horrified by what I witnessed. The whole thing was deplorable, but what I mainly remember twenty years later is Pat Buchanan’s frightening culture war speech and the crowd’s enthusiastic hee-haw response. The Texas delegation was front and center, wearing ten-gallon hats and celebrating their hatred of multiculturalism (indeed, biodiversity) with an ardor that made my blood run cold. I figured I wasn’t alone. Pat Buchanan scared the crap out of people with that speech and did wonders for Bill Clinton’s campaign. But, even then, Bush got a bit of a bounce out of his convention. Not so, for Mitt Romney. Mr. Romney received a negative bounce, which is unprecedented. Barely over a third (36%) of the people who watched the convention reported that it made them more likely to vote for Romney/Ryan, while just under a half (46%) said it made them less likely to vote for them.
You can chalk that up to a variety of factors, but the most important one was that Paul Ryan gave a terrible speech that was immediately flagged by the media as being totally dishonest. That’s not how you make a first impression.
1992? Good golly, was that really 20 years ago? Time flies when you’re watching a once-great republic destroy itself.
Ah, yes — the speech that sounded better in the original German. Who could have guessed then that the GOP would have a trove of archival German material that would last them an entire election cycle?
They’re not going for “an entire election cycle” but an entire century. Translating some of the terms that evoke strong emotions was relatively easy for the first seventy years.
The 1992 GOP convention stage had the look and feel of a Third Reich rally stage. At least the 2012 stage designer avoided that error, but it was still a combination of totally bland and weird just like the GOP ticket.
It may not be how one makes a GOOD first impression, but it is how they’ve made an ACCURATE first impression.
Just look at what the Republicans had to work with in their 2012 convention. An entire cast of unsympathetic characters, from the pampered wife of Mitt Romney to the lying-through-his-pearly-whites Vice Presidential candidate to the nominee himself; all as disingenuous and unappealing as any candidate could ever be.
And throw in a humiliating performance by a whacked-out actor talking to a chair, and you’ve got the perfect recipe for disaster. They failed to connect because they are incapable of it. They are tone-deaf and out of touch with the majority of the American people.
And it’s too damned late. They blew it.
Somewhat off-topic, but BooMan DOES IT AGAIN … maybe.
“…Or are we seeing a landslide beginning to form?…”
the GOP is counting on voters to have memory loss, but polls have consistently shown that most people still blame GWB for the economy. The Obama campaign has done a good job of tying RMoney/Ryan to W’s policy era so when the convention played out, I bet a lot of viewers were seeing if the claims were true. (they are)
Also, there is a lot of happy economic nostalgia for the Clinton years among the middle class, I think. And he absolutely destroyed not just the GOP candidates, but the party’s philosophy.
Much of the traditional convention bounce comes from rolling out the V.P. selection.
Romney had to roll out Ryan in July, to distract the media from the Bain and taxes story.
Didn’t Kerry roll out Edwards early and then discover that he got no bounce?
Was it Edwards? They’d already started swiftboating by then, so it might not have been the VP candidate.
BooMan – except for the part about being on the East Coast, your experience of that convention was exactly like mine. That was when I realized that the GOP had nowhere to go but crazier, having seen them get steadily worse for the few conventions leading up to that. Some sort of line was crossed that year, and Buchanan made it obvious.
It was a good convention for home furnishings.
I didn’t watch, but followed along on twitter. Once Eastwood melted down, I had to see that clip.
The thing that struck me was the ‘I got nothin’ sense of it. When you have to invent the convention motto from an edited, out of context line from a POTUS speech(we built that), ie. a Lie, what is to follow from that premise is bound to be total bullshit.
I also thought a lot about how the GOP used to at least put on a good show, despite their execrable policies. Now they can’t even get that right.
I never thought I’d see the day when Democrats totally owned the GOP on taxes and national defense.
Re: Ability to put on a show.
I like to compare it to the MIC. It’s become so corrupt, incestuous and lazy that it can’t perform anymore.
It’s going to take a lot more than ‘the campaign is still structurally the same’ to get Romney’s keel levelled out. It’s all the talk on the shows as well as the internet and the hole is just getting darker and darker for them. As one talker put it, the campaign dynamics are NOT still structurally the same, the Conventions are in the rear mirror now and the clock is closing any opportunities that time may have offered.
The tapes the MSM is dredging up to counter Ryan’s mouth with his mouth of just a year ago are just damning. Course the “I got 98% of what we wanted” from Boehner last August are just frosting.