It is not just conservatives who are coming to the realization that John McCain’s Convention speech was largely successful. Walter Shapiro notes:

But what does seem clear — and, believe it or not, we are not talking about Sarah Palin here — is that McCain’s acceptance speech, widely derided as flat and forgettable, seems to have connected with persuadable voters. As pollster Andrew Smith, who directs the Survey Center at the University of New Hampshire, put it, “What McCain did best was to connect with the blue-collar vote and portray Barack Obama as the second coming of John Kerry.”

And so, while everyone is fascinated by the Sarah Palin phenomenon, we shouldn’t lose track of John McCain’s expert move to scoop up independents. In his speech, he offered patriotism, nonpartisanship, reform and outsider-ness. It isn’t hard to see that this would be more attractive to swing voters than Obama’s angry rhetoric about America’s decline, McCain’s purported lack of determination to track down Osama bin Laden, and his vision of government as the solution to our woes.