MSNBC anchors Joy Reid and Lawrence O’Donnell weighed in on Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance’s vice presidential acceptance speech Wednesday, noting they were underwhelmed by his remarks.
Kicking off the reaction, O’Donnell commented that even former Vice President Dick Cheney’s speech years ago—which hardly anyone remembers—was “more exciting.”
“Stylistically, in terms of a convention speaker, I had to think back. I was trying to remember: What was Dick Cheney’s speech like?” the anchor of The Last Word said, eliciting laughter from some of his colleagues at the table. “I think it was a little more exciting. And I know Dan Quayle’s was better. I don’t know, you have to go back to… Richard Nixon, maybe, to find something as flat as that vice presidential speech.”
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When Rachel Maddow asked him to explain why he believed Vance’s speech was dull, O’Donnell elaborated that it’s possible that Vance’s audience didn’t do him any favors.
“The lines were written for the surge from the crowd, and he didn’t get it,” he said. “The ‘invasion of Iraq’ line was actually written for a surge that he did not get. There was no response to it at all. There was no response to a bunch of these lines, and I wondered, is it the crowd? Do they not think, are those not winning lines with this crowd anymore? Are they exhausted? Or is it his fault as a speaker. And I suspect that it was his fault and his rhythms.”
O’Donnell then praised Donald Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence, for his oratory.
“Mike Pence did that preacher thing. He did that Christian preacher thing, which that audience understands and knows how to respond to the rhythms of it,” he said, adding that Vance “didn’t have any rhythms.”
Colleague Joy Reid contrasted Vance’s speech with that of former Trump White House aide Peter Navarro, who on Wednesday completed the final day of his prison sentence for defying a House Jan. 6 Committee subpoena and made it to Milwaukee to receive an enthusiastic welcome.
“He lifted the crowd, but it was when he threw them red-hot beats,” Reid said. “And this speech just seemed to be designed to do the opposite—to make sure he did not have more charisma than the nominee, that he sort of seemed like his nice grandson who didn’t really do any harm.”
Rather than convey “radicalism,” Vance “sort of gave us normal,” she added.
“He kind of gave us something similar to what Donald Trump ran on in 2016, which was the ‘man of steel’ speech, where they just talked about the heart and soul of America is going to be renewed by Donald Trump.”
