Same night, same speeches, two views:

Christopher Caldwell in the Weekly Standard:

Giuliani should have been the oratorical silver bullet of this convention. Bush’s response to September 11 is the basis on which his presidency

(rightly) will be judged. The one person with unimpeachable authority to say what he wants about it is Giuliani, who–manna from electoral heaven–is a pro-Bush Republican who got elected by swing voters. So why was Giuliani chosen to speak on Monday night (when the networks weren’t present) while the novelty-act Georgia “Democrat” Zell Miller gets to go before a national audience to heave red meat at Southern conservatives who’ll vote for Bush anyway?

Giuliani’s speech was not what it could have been. A magnificent 18-minute kernel of post–September 11 reminiscences, humor, anti-Kerry invective, and skillful courtship of the Jewish vote (by linking decades of terrorism against Israel to contemporary terrorism against America) was bloated into a 45-minute shaggy-dog story by Giuliani’s own extemporizing. Some editor failed to stand up to him. The speech collapsed under the weight of attempting to do two incompatible things: (1) woo liberals conservative on defense with the same commonsensical appeals he used as mayor to woo liberals conservative on crime and disorder; and (2) fling invective at the Democrats (implying they swear a lot) that played well in the hall but will keep crossover voters from crossing over in the first place.

William Saletan in Slate:

More egregiously than McCain, Giuliani equates the plotters of 9/11 with the butchers of Iraq. He recalls Bush’s vow that the terrorists who attacked America would “hear from us.” “They heard from us in Iraq,” says Giuliani. To get around the absence of WMD, he adds that Saddam “was himself a weapon of mass destruction.” Please. There’s nothing less suitable for strained metaphors than weapons of mass destruction. They’re horribly literal. Don’t insult the gravity of these weapons by suggesting that even if the country you invaded didn’t have them, the guy who ran the country is sort of like one of them.

The twist Giuliani adds to McCain’s argument is an obsessive repetition of two opposing concepts. Giuliani calls them “offense” and “defense.” Defense is what lily-livered liberals advocate: waiting for terrorists to attack us. Offense is what Bush is doing: hitting the terrorists before they can hit us. The offense/defense metaphor treats the use of force as a football game, in which the enemy is clear, and every attack we launch is an advance. This eliminates the salient complication of reality: Al-Qaida and Saddam were distinct adversaries, and attacking the latter wasn’t necessarily an advance against the former.

For the record, I thought McCain’s speech hit the right notes for the most part, arguing for unity and constancy as a strategic move, but Giuliani dragged the party’s rhetoric back to the overly simplistic black/white, on/off, us/them worldview that’s turned off a lot of people, myself included. Three more nights to go, though…