Romney and "The Speech"

Presidential candidate Mitt Romney delivered the speech yesterday, allegedly to address concerns about his Mormon faith. Whether to make it or not has been subject to internal debate for awhile. I haven't watched it, because it's not an issue to me. But apparently it's enough of a concern to enough GOP voters that the campaign went with it. You can view the speech here.

The reaction to it by the punditocracy was what caught my attention. Hugh Hewitt gushed:

Mitt Romney's "Faith in America" speech was simply magnificent, and anyone who denies it is not to be trusted as an analyst. On every level it was a masterpiece. The staging and Romney's delivery, the eclipse of all other candidates it caused, the domination of the news cycle just prior to the start of absentee voting in New Hampshire on Monday --for all these reasons and more it will be long discussed as a masterpiece of political maneuver.

Which led to Bryan at hotair.com commenting:

I liked Romney’s speech quite a bit, but Hugh is making out like it was the St. Crispin’s Day speech as delivered by Winston Churchill in the Sistine Chapel on the first Christmas with Nazi bombers overhead.

Either that or the declaration of independence speech by President Whitmore on July 4th before he hopped into his airplane to attack the giant flying saucers.

With apologies to Shakespeare a bit of this masterpiece of snark from one of the readers at hotair:

Journalist nor pundit, shall over free men
Be by flowing words a common will deny.
This civic will the good man teach his son;
And Election Day shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be triumphant,–
We Free, We Happy Free, We Americans.
For we that day that cast our votes in free
Rule we together; be we ne’er so vile,
This day shall our wisdom show forth:
And “Great Men” in our land now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurst they were not there;
And hold their statecraft cheap whiles any speaks
That voted with us upon Election Day.