GOP Convention And False Narratives

So it’s on. Last night Mitt Romney formally accepted the nomination to be the Republican nominee for President.

I thought the convention went well. I actually thought whoever produced the 2008 convention did a better job, but it doesn’t really matter. Hardly anybody watches gavel to gavel coverage so they’re not seeing a lot of what goes on unless they are watching uninterrupted coverage on C-Span.

The coverage by the news networks ranged from decent to downright awful. Fox News and CNN both did a decent job. You got what you expected from both. Say what you want about John King and Wolf Blitzer, but they do pretty solid coverage of this kind of thing as did Bret Baier and Megyn Kelly on Fox News.

MSNBC on the other hand, was an embarrassment. The same network bosses who thought Keith Olbermann was too extreme thought it was a good idea to have Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow, Al Sharpton, Ed Schultz and Chris Hayes head up the coverage of the convention. Sure, Steve Schmidt was there but largely it seemed to feature incredulous looks from the others listed whenever he said something reasonable. I would have hated to have been the person who had to clean up all the spittle that group was ejecting from their mouths as the whined like spoiled toddlers who are no longer allowed to use their pacifier. Pathetic doesn’t even begin to describe it. I said last night their coverage was like one big long NY Times editorial. I don’t what’s worse – the spittle-flecked outrage expressed by these clowns after every speech during the RNC, or the adoring, fainting couch ass-kissing we are going to see next week during the Democratic Convention.

One thing that struck at me during the entire convention however, was the false narrative the analysts tried to put together that “nobody’s talking about Mitt Romney.” The laziness of the pundit class and the media was on full display as they kept remarking how none of the speakers were talking about Mitt Romney enough or they were waiting until x amount of words before they said his name or they “only said his name ____ times while they said “I” ____ times!”

They were trying to create a narrative of, “Nobody really likes Mitt and they think he is going to lose so they’re all going to talk about themselves for a potential run in 2016.” Joe Scarborough was off his rocker proclaiming, “My God, you’d never see this at the 2000 or 2004 convention. Karl Rove and George W. Bush would not allow that to happen! They’d look at those speeches and made sure people were saying Bush’s name constantly!” (I’m paraphrasing). Liberal pundits behaved as though at Democratic conventions, speakers said “Obama” or “Kerry” every other word and made it all about the nominee instead of themselves.

Really? Unlike the lazy media, I went back and dug up some keynote addresses and counted words. And I don’t even get paid for this shit.

2004 Keynote address from Zell Miller at the RNC – Words:1600. Number of times he said “I”: 37. Number of times he said “Bush”: 8.

2004 keynote address from Barack Obama at the DNC – Words: 2100. Number of times he said “I”: 31. Number of times he said “Kerry”: 13.

2008 Keynote address from Mark Warner at the DNC – Words: 2050. Number of times he said “I”: 22. Number of times he said “Obama”: 10.

2012 speech by Marco Rubio at the RNC – Words: 1736. Number of times he said “I”: 13. Number of times he said “Romney”: 7

2012 Keynote address from Chris Christie at the RNC – Words: 2600. Number of times he said “I”: 39. Number of times he said “Romney”: 10

Not as striking as they’d have you believe is it?

Unfortunately, that is how the narrative builds.

The other false narrative is the Clint Eastwood speech. Again, the pundit class and political writers are so far disconnected from the average person, just like the political figures they cover. Yeah, from a political perspective, Eastwood’s stunt would have been an absolute disaster if Tim Pawlenty or Bob McDonnell tried to do it.

But this was Clint Eastwood. America loves the guy and the average Joe tuning into the convention for the first time was treated to something different and I can guarantee that most people enjoyed it. The howls of outrage from the left were hilarious to watch. Remember, these are the same people who think it was just so funny and clever when Bill Maher “joked” that Sarah Palin is a “c**t.”

The biggest purveyor of this false narrative was none other than Chuck Todd from MSNBC who just the day before was chastising people over their praise of Paul Ryan’s speech saying, “Nobody remembers anything about what those before the nominee said!” However, this morning he said something remarkable when his show started. He claimed Eastwood’s speech was “Well received in the arena but had people at home scratching their heads.”

How on earth could he possibly know this? He couldn’t. Again, he was attempting to build a narrative which is one that says, “The Clint Eastwood thing hurt Romney” which is complete hogwash. But unfortunately, this is what they do. Professionals like Chuck Todd always want to believe they are smarter than everybody else. So they pontificate about these things as though they are an authority and when they are shown to be wrong, they don’t say so. They just move on to building the next false narrative.

Andrew Breitbart recognized this and told people to fight back. That’s what we have to do.