Not having seen Obama’s speech yet, I can’t say much about it aside from the reactions I’ve been reading, but it gives me a slightly different perspective on how poor Jindal’s response was. I viewed his response by itself without having seen any clips from the President’s address to Congress, and it was simply awful. This seems to be the growing consensus. I grant that no one who gives the response to these addresses comes out looking very good. Sebelius was mind-numbingly boring with all of her bromides about the joys of bipartisanship, and who can even remember anything Gary Locke said in a response before that? Go back just a few years, and you can’t even remember who gave most of the responses.* That is the good news for Jindal. Now for the bad news.

Now that I think about it, Jindal’s response was structured like a party convention speech, and all that was missing was the endorsement of the party’s presidential candidate. There is the introductory personal story, repeated efforts to play to the crowd’s old-time favorites, deliberate insertions of talking points that match the presidential candidate’s slogans (I can’t be the only one who groaned when Jindal talked about cutting out such-and-such a number of earmarks from the state budget) and the inevitable catchphrase that links an otherwise jumbled speech together with a theme. In this case, apparently it was that “Americans can do anything,” which is something most Americans may like hearing, but which hit my ears as painfully as if it were an icepick. I don’t expect public officials to eschew confidence-building rhetoric (indeed, the President could probably stand to have a bit more of that in his public remarks), but this unusually saccharine expression of optimism is not only at odds with the public mood, but it is just insulting.

Incidentally, the party convention structure explains the tone and cadence Jindal was using, and it explains why so much of the speech was about him. Convention speakers, especially if they are giving high-profile, primetime speeches, are supposed to use their personal biographies to illustrate the theme of the convention or the theme of the day, and the speeches are all supposed to be either upbeat and celebratory or energetic exercises in denouncing the folly of the other party. Jindal chose the latter. Matthew Gagnon at The Next Right objected to the lack of wonkishness and policy details, as well he should, but if you imagine that this speech was taking place in St. Paul in September its vacuity and irritating pacing would have been right at home. Remember, Jindal never had the chance to give a speech at the convention because of the hurricane, to which he very capably responded as governor, so it is quite possible that any convention speech he had ready to go was dusted off and reworked a little and turned into last night’s disaster. So, yes, the McCain campaign continues, and Hurricane Gustav has claimed another victim.

* Alex Massie’s post reminds me that Jim Webb delivered an effective response to Bush’s 2007 State of the Union.

Update: E.D. Kain responds:

So he was bad – really bad – but hey, tough act to follow and, you know, these response speeches are always bad so….what? If they’re always bad then it really begs the question of why we bother to do them in the first place.

First, not all responses are equally bad. Given the constraints of the format, Webb came as close to matching the President rhetorically as anyone I have seen in a long time. Of course, he is a talented writer and has a combative personality well-suited to this sort of speech. One reason why I think the opposition goes through the ritual of the response is to avoid becoming entirely irrelevant to the debate. As outmatched as the opposition is, it still pays to make an effort rather than concede the evening entirely to the President. There is the danger that this can backfire and the opposition party, if it is the minority party, can remind voters of exactly why the party is and will remain in the minority for a long time. Under normal circumstances, Jindal’s bad speech would not generate as much discussion, but there are several yawning gaps–between expectations of how Jindal would do and how he did, between Obama’s oratorical skills and Jindal’s, between the popularity of the President and the deep unpopularity of the party Jindal represents–that make a bad speech at this moment particularly unfortunate for the minority party. We have not recently seen a situation where the minority party is as badly beaten and bereft of ideas as the GOP is today, and so we are not used to the kind of pressure now put on their prominent spokesmen to deliver something interesting, which makes the failure to do so that much more damaging.

Under the best of circumstances, no respondent was going to outshine Obama, but it has been possible for respondents to put in a creditable performance. Jindal had the misfortune of representing a party with nothing to say and having the even greater misfortune to be matched up against a President who both definitely has something to say and can say it very effectively, which is why the normally ho-hum irrelevance of the opposition’s response has become full-blown disaster for the GOP. Aside from Michael Steele comments, this was the first time a prominent Republican leader addressed the nation since Bush left office, and this was a valuable opportunity to demonstrate that the GOP had learned from its failures and could now serve as a credible political opposition. As with the GOP leadership’s approach to the stimulus, the party showed again with the response that it had not learned any of the right lessons and that it was simply not up to the task of being that credible opposition. What some on the right seem to be missing is that this failure should seem far more terrible to everyone who reacted very negatively to the President’s address. If much of Obama’s domestic agenda should be stopped or limited as much as possible, as I believe it should, the face of the opposition party that Jindal presented to the nation last night is simply not up to the task, and this is demoralizing and slightly horrifying.

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