Perhaps the most surprising thing about Alvin Greene’s first speech since his unlikely primary win weeks ago was that there was nothing really that surprising about it (and that, disappointingly, there were no plugs for action figures). The Senate candidate for the most part avoided any major gaffes in the six-and-a-half-minute speech he delivered Sunday at the NAACP’s monthly meeting in Manning, South Carolina.
Greene stuck to three pretty straightforward talking points: jobs, education, and justice; and the speech was laden with platitudes and vague goals, the AP reports, such as “Let’s get South Carolina and America back to work and let’s move South Carolina forward,” and “Parents need to take more of a part in their children’s education, especially parents of underperforming students,” without any subsequent specifics about, you know, how to actually make that happen.
Though he avoided the long, awkward pauses that defined his earlier interviews, the AP says, he wasn’t able to hide his nerves entirely: “[T]he candidate occasionally fidgeted, wiped his brow and intently studied a black spiral notebook where he apparently wrote his remarks.” Well, better he literally read from his own notebook when giving a speech than figuratively take a page from Sarah Palin’s.
