Fox's Immediate Response
Reported by Melanie - September 3, 2004 -
The first words uttered at the conclusion of Bush's speech last night (September 2, 2004) by Fox's Brit Hume were: "a speech lasting an hour and two minutes, interrupted 108 times by applause, comes to an end." That about summarizes the half hour "review" which followed.
Hume said the single word that described the speech was "liberty;' no big new initiatives, but proposals "rooted in ideas he's long had." He said so much of it was "devoted to details, rather like a State of the Union address perhaps."
Bill Kristol said he thought it was "pitch-perfect," it set forth a "reasonably coherent" and "moderately conservative" agenda, Bush "justified the war on terror," and it was "quite moving" and "poetic."
Mara Liasson agreed that the first part of the speech was like a state of the union address and though he didn't go into a lot of detail Liason said he did a good job.
Mort Kondracke said the speech was "prosaic on the domestic side" but, he thought, "soaring and lyrical on the foreign policy side."
Fred Barnes thought it was a "transformed speech," one better delivered than read. Barns said "it's clear he's not a small government conservative," because the press got copies of the administration's 50 page "agenda" which contains words like expand, provide, increase, promote, and develop.
Hume asked Kristol whether he thought Bush's speech would help him, since Kerry's speech didn't help him as much as everyone presumed it would. Kristol said he thought it would "help the President quite a lot" because Kerry's speech was "too artificial" as he made an "attempt to run away, of course, from his authentic center." Liasson agreed but said Bush needed to change people's minds and motivate those who've soured on him to take a second look.
Then (one of my favorite parts) Mort Kondrake brought up Kerry's "midnight speech" to be made later that night, and said (they'd seen copies) that compared to Bush's speech, it comes off as "incredibly petty. I mean, you know, he's [Kerry] going to accuse them of questioning his patriotism and he's going to go after the wartime draft deferments of Dick Cheney, for heavens sake." Fred Barnes chimed in that any campaign holding "unusual events," like a midnigt speech, is "probably in trouble."
Michael Barone was on the floor of Madison Square Garden. He said that in the past four or five months "old media, [like "old Europe," I guess] the broadcast news networks, the New York Times, the news pages of the Washington Post, have set the agenda, they have been framing the issues" and this was Bush's attempt to put forth his version of what's at stake. Barone said the speech contained "moments of quite wonderful elegance and beauty of words," and that it rivaled Barack Obama's speech.
Chris Wallace said peope find Bush likeable and in that category he has a considerable lead over Kerry.
COMMENT: I think I might even vote for Bush after hearing this!
