McCain

Finally the conventions are over. McCain is no great orator, we all know that, but I thought the writing in huge chunks of his speech was mediocre and mundane and probably some other "m" words stolen out of my Thesaurus. All in all, average stuff, but the GOPers liked it and he tossed them the kind of red meat the Republican faithful love to hear: God, country, lower taxes, and the like. In that way, it succeeded.

And I can finally stop writing about convention speeches.

What I'm waiting for now is a sense of the polling, the post-convention bump, and how these candidates were able to define themselves -- and each other -- in the minds of Americans. A CBS news poll from 9/1 - 9/3 has the race a dead heat. Weird, because other recent polls have Obama ahead by 5 or 6 percentage points. I don't think we can pay much attention to any of them until we see polling done after both conventions.

Silly season is upon us. Jon Stewart kinda gets at it below.