Condoleezza Rice outshines Paul Ryan at the Republican convention

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/30/condoleezza-rice-paul-ryan-republican-convention

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It was supposed to be Paul Ryan's night. The lineup of speakers was studded with the vice-presidential B listers from both Mitt Romney's first draft picks and the political writers' imaginations: Rob Portman, Tim Pawlenty, Condoleezza Rice, Susan Martinez, John Thune, Mike Huckabee.

A major theme of the remarks was the disparagement of liberals' supposed desire to soothe feelings at all costs; Huckabee mocked the new-age parenting cliche of "giving everyone a trophy for showing up", but that is also a pretty apt description of how the night's slots seemed to be filled. One speaker actually won a prize for the night – unfortunately for the Romney campaign, it wasn't Paul Ryan. Former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice walked off the stage in a mist of wistfulness and applause as her passionate and positive message brought the convention to its feet and generated its first taste of unrehearsed, unexpected excitement.

Paul Ryan gave a speech as well, and it delivered hormone-injected red meat to a hungry crowd, but it didn't show anyone anything new: In fact, he has been trotting out pieces of it to the stump ever since he accepted the position. The conventional wisdom always had it that Romney would select a "boring white guy", and, indeed, the men intended to warm up the stage for Ryan were warm-up speakers almost solely in the sense that their body temperatures may have heated the air around them. The reception they got was lukewarm.

Huckabee, Pawlenty, Thune and Portman performed the same basic set of jokes and asserted the same slogans with such uniformity it was hard not imagine them as a single blurry white guy with an intermittent Southern accent, referencing Obama's lack of business experience, Romney revealing humble but generic origins.

Again, there may have been a point to this homogeneity. By the time Huckabee got to his eighth recitation of the convention's slogan – "We can do better!" – one hoped that it was a more immediate assurance than a reference to whatever it is a Romney administration might plan. Sure enough, in the short term, the promise was fulfilled, spectacularly, by Rice.

I cannot argue that her speech changed my mind about any of the policies she presented. She was an architect of Bush's pointless, tragic war in Iraq. The speech itself rolled out threats of further expansions in the conveniently ill-defined war on terror. Her economic and energy arguments were vague heralds of free market wish-fulfillment. But with the bar set low enough for Ryan to rise above it, Rice's rhetoric practically soared.

Rice used the lens of her own unarguably audacious rise from a child in the deep south to focus on the kinds of ideas that inspire things besides rage. Whereas the generic humble beginnings narratives of the boring white guys filled in blanks, Rice filled hearts. Ironically, she articulated the vision of America that makes Romney's biography so discomforting. She said:

<blockquote>"The essence of America – that which really unites us – is not ethnicity, or nationality or religion – it is an idea – and what an idea it is: that you can come from humble circumstances and do great things. That it doesn't matter where you came from but where you are going."</blockquote>

Rice ended "on a personal note" to reference "a little girl grows up in Jim Crow Birmingham" whose "parents can't take her to a movie theatre or a restaurant" but who make "make her believe that even though she can't have a hamburger at the Woolworth's lunch counter, she can be president of the United States and she becomes the secretary of state". The part about being in the cabinet and not the Oval Office sounds tacked on, but maybe I'm overly optimistic. But I'm not the only one with such a vision. After Rice spoke, Fox News confirmed that she delivered the speech without a prompter. For them, that is akin to printing "CONDI 2016" bumperstickers.

Her speech suggested the kind of Republican who would truly "raise the conversation", and if it seems like settling to want an opposition party to simply not be so utterly vindictive, well, yes, I will settle for that. It might even mean that the Democrats would ratchet down their spite as well.

Ryan's speech did not immediately follow Rice's – lucky for him. Susana Martinez, the governor of New Mexico, spoke after the secretary and in the context of Rice's ovation she did as well as one could possibly ask. That her first big applause line was for merely owning a gun did suggest that the convention was settling back in to its more familiar mode.

Ryan picked up where the cliches before had left off. He only developed real energy as he tore his teeth into Obama, doing so with such delight that some facts got mangled along the way. There was the familiar lie about Obama's "raiding" of Medicare, and a repetition of the accusation that Obama "closed" a GM plant in Wisconsin in 2008 before he became president.

Ryan's feistiness was probably the right note to end on. Whatever "We can do better" is supposed to mean, it's always best to keep focused on executing the next step ahead. For Romney and Ryan, that means ginning up as much antipathy for Obama as possible without making Americans feel stupid for voting for him in the first place. His image of "college graduates … staring up at fading Obama posters and wondering when they can move out and get going with life" is the kind of poignant conjecture that definitely sounds true.

Ryan's fresh face and charm allow him to deliver the same old indictments in a way that makes them look like the revelations of someone who only just now realised they'd made a mistake. As a friend who has been disillusioned with Obama for some time now put it, "He's the Boy Scout with a knife." Whether you're frightened or excited by that image tells you something about how you will respond to the Republicans' message on election day.