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CBS News: Did Hillary Mean It?

By only

Wednesday August 27, 2008

CBS News: Did Hillary Mean It?:

I’ve been absolutely mind fuckingly boggled at the lengths everyone seems to be going today to spin Hillary’s excellent speech in a million little dumb directions. As anyone who followed this blog through the primaries knows, there are no Hillary haters greater than I am. None. But calling her speech last night anything less than phenomenal and impassioned is pure cynical, manipulative bullshit at its finest. Here is the best example I’ve found so far. CBS brought in a body language expert to analyze Hillary’s delivery, and finds that her passion comes up short.

What we wanted to see was a Churchillian speech, something that would move her candidate to cross that magic fence. And she delivered a speech, but the gestures — the non-verbals that give us the emotion — really weren’t there.

One of the things that you see is she has very limited hand gestures. And we look for hand gestures to tell us what’s important. So, when we see them out, when we see them up, this is significant. And we saw them just a few times last night, but not enough. This was not an impassioned speech.