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To borrow a tired cliche, I wouldn't say he hit a home run last night, but he did hit a solid double, which is more than good enough for those of us who feared that Kerry might pop up. Nearly all the pundits (except for a few Republican whores) agreed that Kerry did what he needed to do (another tired cliche . . .) last night.
I forget who the commentator was, but this one guy made a few shrewed observations. First, regarding the length of the speech . . . this commentator said that the Kerry campaign made a smart move in timing the speech to end close to 11:00 pm, which allowed them to communicate their message in a largely unfiltered fashion. If the speech had ended early, the networks might have given Republican operatives the opportunity to make a rebuttal. That didn't happen, at least on the networks. And for those of you who were wondering why the Kerry campaign showed the bio film before network coverage began, that's because the network commentators would simply have talked over it. Second, the Kerry speech was clearly targetd at swing voters, very few of whom were probably watching the speech live. So it didn't really matter whether the speech was too long, since most swing voters would end up hearing only the sound bytes reported in the morning news shows. And the speech was chock full of good sound bytes.
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