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Opening Arguments

Two speeches

I watched both big GOP Convention speeches last night -- Ann Romney followed by Chris Christie -- and I'm not sure I totally agree with this assessment:

Mrs. Romney succeeded in conveying to the audience in the hall — and, the campaign hopes, to the millions watching on television — her love for her husband, her belief in his essential goodness, and, perhaps most importantly, her implicit faith in his abilities.  “This man will not fail,” she assured the audience near the end of her speech.  “This man will not let us down.”

Mrs. Romney clearly believes that if she were flying in a plane, and the pilot died from a heart attack, Mitt Romney would find a way to land the plane safely.  She wanted to communicate that faith to the audience, and she did.

The campaign enjoyed less success with the convention’s keynote speaker, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

[. . .]

Our problems are big and the solutions will not be painless,” Christie added.  “We all must share in the sacrifice.”

The lines were particularly appealing to Republicans who stress the entitlement reforms and spending cuts in the Romney-Ryan economic plan.  There’s pain ahead, they say, and voters need to get used to the idea.  But a lot of voters are already in pain.  And all Americans have had a pretty painful decade.

I agree completely with his thoughts about Mrs. Romney's speech. She's an appealing, compelling person and did a good job -- much better than the candidate himself ever has -- of making Mitt seem less stiff and more human. But I liked Christie's speech better than he did. Yes, it was a downer with all those references to pain and suffering and shared sacrifices. Voters tend to respond more to an optimistic view of the future rather than a grim assessment of the present. But Christie ain't wrong, and if Romney wins without reminding voters of what's coming, he will have done a big disservice to the country.

Romney's job is to tell us what has to be done to pull ourselves back from the cliff but show us there will be a payoff for the effort, which will be more appealing to voters than the suffering they're already going through for no good reason and with no end in sight. Christie set Romney up to make that case, so he did what he was supposed to do, in my view.

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