McTeleprompter's "I do the cha-cha like a sissy girl" problem

By GottaLaff

Poor John Sidney McCrotchety. He has teleprompter issues. Actually, let's broaden that out a bit. He is a befuddled, often careless speaker in search of a Cyrano de Bergerac:

“I have set before the American people an energy plan, the Lex-eegton Project,” Mr. McCain said, drawing a quick breath and correcting himself. “The Lex-ing-ton Proj-ect,” he said slowly. “The Lexington Project,” he repeated. “Remember that name.”

In a town meeting in Cincinnati the next day, Mr. McCain would again slip up on the name of the Massachusetts town, where, he noted, “Americans asserted their independence once before.” He called it “the Lexiggdon Project” and twice tried to fix his error before flipping the name (“Project Lexington”) in subsequent references.

So many cringeworthy moments, so little time:

By his own admission, Mr. McCain is not a great orator. He is ill-suited to lecterns, which often dwarf his small stature, and he tends to sound as if he is reading his lines, not speaking them. His shortcomings have been accentuated in a two-man race, particularly because the other man — Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee — can often dazzle on stage. [...]

He is working to limit his verbal tangents and nonverbal tics. He is speaking less out of the sides of his mouth, which can produce a wiseguy twang reminiscent of the Penguin from the Batman stories, and he is relying less on his favorite semantic crutch — the phrase “my friends” — which he used repeatedly in his campaign appearances.

Who wouldn't want to listen to that? How unfortunate that his Big Republican Convention Speech Day will only come but once.

And then there's that persistent mean streak he can't seem to avoid:

Alan Schroeder, a journalism professor at Northeastern University, said, “There’s a danger of sarcasm becoming nastiness, and McCain seems to be conscious of that line.”

And when he tries to rein in his hostility?

The more careful McCain, said by some to be overly scripted, has received some withering critiques. “His rhetorical style can best be described as ‘tired mayonnaise,’ ” the comedian Stephen Colbert declared on “The Colbert Report” before inviting viewers to enter the “Make McCain Exciting Challenge.”

Peter Spaulding, the chairman of Mr. McCain’s campaign in New Hampshire, said he recently saw a McCain speech on television that was “just atrocious.”

Uh-oh! Hostile alert!

He sheepishly volunteered that he received complaints after a recent Newsweek profile of his wife, Cindy, said that he sometimes referred to her alma mater, the University of Southern California, as the University of Spoiled Children. [...] (It is fortunate for Mr. McCain that there was no YouTube in the 1980s when he jokingly referred to the retirement community Leisure World as “Seizure World.”)

After those little potshots, the Lex-eegton Project doesn't look so bad any more.