Welcome to this week’s Voice Votes, a feature in which we grade the week’s headlines—and poke fun at them. You can join the fun by suggesting your own #win, #fail, and #meh candidates via Twitter. (Send tweets @nationaljournal). Need more space? E-mail suggestions to Readers@nationaljournal.com or leave us a comment on Facebook. We’ll publish the best suggestions in this space every week and credit the authors.
Here’s how we vote this week:
#Win on New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s keynote address, which used the word “I” 37 times and ran 1,700 words before mentioning Mitt Romney. As any good keynote should, it reminded us that there’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s a Chris Christie America.
#Win on Ann Romney’s speech on Tuesday night, especially the part where she went off script and announced, “I love you, women!” No point in subtlety when your husband has a gender gap of eight points.
#Fail for the noisy protest in the convention hall on Tuesday by Ron Paul supporters from Maine after the party stripped them of their delegate status to ensure that Romney carried Maine’s votes. As the Maine protestors went, so went … the Maine protestors.
#Fail on the choice of Sher Valenzuela to speak on the virtues of private enterprise as part of Tuesday’s “We Did Build It” theme, which was designed to rebut President Obama’s position that private enterprise owes much to government infrastructure and other support. Valenzuela, a candidate for lieutenant governor in Delaware, gave a PowerPoint presentation in May instructing small business owners on the virtues of growing their firms through government contracts and other subsidies. To be fair to Valenzuela, as far as we know, she did build the slide show all by herself.
#Win on former Florida Republican Gov. Charlie Crist’s surprise endorsement of President Obama in the pages the Tampa Bay Times on the eve of the convention. Republicans may still be the party of the evangelicals, but the Democrats are now the party of Crist.
#Win on the news that ABC’s audience of 2.3 million for Tuesday night’s convention overage was about the same size as the audience for MTV’s Jersey Shore spinoff Snooki and JWoWW. Previously, the only RNC-Jersey Shore connection had been John Boehner’s tan.
#Win on country music star Lane Turner’s live performance from the convention hall. Turner wrote two songs specifically for the convention, including “Blood, Sweat, and Freedom,” which coincidentally happen to be the secret ingredients in the Bloody Marys at the Alabama delegation breakfast.
#Win on the Romney fundraiser held on Wednesday in Tampa on a yacht reportedly flying the flag of the Cayman Islands. The event was another brilliant messaging move by the Romney campaign, symbolically alluding to all of the convention’s themes: “We Built It” (this port, at which you’re docking your foreign yacht); “We Can Change it” (the registration of our yacht, business, or mutual fund); and “We Believe in America” (as a great place to live and a terrible place to pay taxes on a yacht).
#Fail on Clint Eastwood's rambling, off-prompter prime-time address on Thursday night, in which he spent several minutes interviewing an empty chair. Clint, on behalf of those charged with making fun of the news, you just made our day.
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