In delivering his speech at the Republican National Convention, Rudy Giuliani helped himself to an extra 13 minutes over his allotted time. As a result, the plan to air a video about Sarah Palin was jettisoned, and her teleprompter went on the blink, Republican sources tell Newsmax.
Giuliani had submitted his prepared speech and agreed to stick with it. But once on stage, he added lengthy material to his remarks. To recover and squeeze more of Palin’s 40-minute speech into prime time, the McCain camp scrapped a four-minute video introduction of the vice presidential candidate.
In the process of being fast-forwarded to skip over the video, the teleprompter somehow got off course. As a result of that, it did not display her speech as Palin was about to start speaking before 45,000 people at Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Minn. She had to look at the hard copy of her speech until the teleprompter finally started a bit further into the speech.
Despite Giuliani’s thoughtlessness, Palin began her speech flawlessly and did not seem rattled.
Two days before Palin was to give her speech, speechwriter Matthew Scully met with the Alaska governor in an $89-a-night room at the Manchester Inn in Middletown, Ohio, and wrote a draft. After she saw the draft, “The governor attacked the speech and made it her own,” as one source put it.
After incorporating her last-minute changes, Palin and the McCain staff left her hotel for the convention without bringing a hard copy of the speech. When she asked about it, they returned to the hotel to pick it up.
The McCain campaign played the video at the convention the following day before John McCain’s speech. It focused largely on Palin’s personal side, saying she grew up in a log cabin heated by a wood stove.
The McCain campaign had no comment. A spokesman for Giuliani did not respond to a request for comment.
Despite the fact that the speech began about nine minutes later than planned and without an introduction, more than 40 million Americans watched Palin give her remarks, according to Nielsen figures. That compares with 37.2 million who watched Barack Obama’s acceptance speech, including results from four networks that did not run Palin’s speech.
The liberal media have begun a furious attack on her, including questioning whether a mother of five can handle the job of vice president. But as noted in the Newsmax story "McCain Shows He Is the Genuine Article", while she lacks years of experience, in contrast to Obama, Palin has a string of real accomplishments to show for herself.
As a mayor, she cut property taxes 40 percent and reduced her own salary. Just before being appointed to the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission in 2003, she led an ethics probe of the commission's chairman, Randy Ruedrich, who was also the state GOP chairman. Facing conflict-of-interest allegations, Ruedrich admitted ethics violations and resigned.
As governor, she ultimately opposed a federal earmark for the $400 million so-called "bridge to nowhere." She used her veto power to cut nearly $2 billion from the state budget. She was successful in enacting ethics reform legislation. While giving incentives to oil companies to find more resources, she also increased taxes on oil production, saying the companies had improperly influenced legislators to keep taxes low. The higher tax rate will enable her to deliver a rebate of $1,200 to each state resident.
Obama, on the other hand, has virtually no accomplishments beyond getting himself elected. While he often talks about his work as a community organizer, he never achieved his one goal — eliminating asbestos from a housing project in Chicago.
In both the Illinois Senate and the U.S. Senate, Obama developed a reputation for voting “present,” thus avoiding controversial decisions that could be used against him later. In the U.S. Senate, he has missed more than one in five votes. Only one of the measures Obama has sponsored as a U.S. senator has been enacted: a bill to “promote relief, security, and democracy in the Democratic Republic of Congo.”
Contrary to Obama’s portrayal of himself as a unifier, on every bipartisan effort in the Senate to forge compromises on tough issues, Obama has been missing in action.
“The Democrats and the liberal media were caught flatfooted by Palin,” says Brad Blakeman, a former Bush White House aide who headed Freedom’s Watch. “They are beside themselves that this unknown governor has taken the country by storm, not only with Republicans but with people throughout the country. How dare she!”
Ronald Kessler is chief Washington correspondent of Newsmax.com. View his previous reports and get his dispatches sent to you free via
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