Quote Originally Posted by minnesota man
I listened to Radnofsky Sunday morning on Air America radio. I believe it was a local Texas broadcast. During the interview, she read her answers. I'm fine with her knowing the questions before the interview but the reading was monotonous and awkward. To make it worse the radio show theme music played on in the background. The whole production was terrible. I can't even remember anything she said but she did mention the tote bag gimick.
Greetings, Minnesota Man! Was the "she" you're referring to Kay Bailey Hutchison? I just wanted to make sure. If so, I was going to tell you that about 10 years ago she came to speak at a gathering my company hosted, some sort of big economics forum that I can no longer remember the name of. There were various corporate titans and business brains from Harvard and MIT and Wharton. KBH was one of the Texas politicians who came. Martin Frost also spoke.

All the speakers had gotten info packets about the agenda and knew when they'd be speaking and for how long. Most had a half hour of air time to fill. They were all supposed to prepare their own remarks or have their staffs do so, and everyone assumed they'd be eager to do that since this was a pretty big event with lots of press coverage. Just in case they didn't have time, we writers fixed up a one-page sheet of speaking points to provide all the speakers with some ideas in advance.

Anyway, the big day arrived and everyone gathered for the event. And KBH hadn't prepared at all. She arrived with her list of suggested speaking points, which I'm not sure she'd even read. And when her time came to speak, she got up there on the stage and read off the bulleted speaking points very awkwardly, without embellishing or adding anything to them. It was very uneasy-making and sad because she had 30 minutes on the agenda, and she was through with her bulleted list in about 3 1/2 minutes. She asked for questions afterwards, but no one had anything to ask because she'd not said anything. It was a content-free speech. All the "big bidness" types cleared their throats and looked at each other like, "Is this all she's going to say?" And yes, that was all she had to say. Fortunately, some of the other speakers ran long and so we were able to use up the agenda slack she created.

My point to all of this is that I don't believe KBH is much of a speaker or, for that matter, a preparer. The routine read-through must be her standard mode of operation. As a senator, I should think she'd have some original thoughts to share. Or at least I'd hope so. In the years since then, I've always been keen to hear what she has to say when she speaks on the news or on CSpan, but I've pretty well come to the conclusion that she just says the bare, bland, safe, party-line minimum.