So Susan Molinari will be the keynote speaker at this year’s Republican convention, joining an august list of stem-winding luminaries including Harold Stassen, Mark Hatfield, Dan Evans (who?), Richard Lugar, Guy Vander Jagt, Katherine Davalos Ortega (who again?), and Tom Kean. In fact, in the last fourplus decades, we could come up with only one truly memorable keynote address — Douglas MacArthur’s in 1952, in which he gave the man who fired him whatfor in a big way. And the others?
In 1980, Vander Jagt, hoping to impress Gov. Reagan enough to be named the vice-presidential nominee, delivered his 35-minute address from memory — ” When you get down on your knees and ask a gift to marry you,” he said, “you don’t use a TelePrompTer.”
Why was U.S. treasurer Kay Ortega picked for the job in 19847 In the immortal words of a Republican official, still unidentified: “She wasn’t chosen because she’s a woman; she was chosen because she’s a Hispanic.” Ortega began her speech by saying, “I am honored because I know there are many members of our party more eloquent than I.” And she actually said — no foolin” — “Mi casa es su casa.”
Kean, like Molinari a moderate Eastern-seaboard Republican, gave a robust speech in 1988, declaring, “The Democrats may try to talk like Dirty Harry, but they will still act like Pee Wee Herman.”
And most recently, Phil Gramm did not do himself much good in 1992 with a keynote address in which he described himself as a man “tryin’ to do the Lord’s work in the devil’s city.”
Yes, it appears Molinari has some mighty small shoes to fill.
