Alex Massie Alex Massie

Sic Transit Gloria McCain

Sad, really. That was my immediate melancholy reaction to John McCain’s speech to the Republican convention in St Paul. This was not your daddy’s John McCain; heck it weren’t even the John McCain of 2000. McCain, I’m afraid, seemed a wee old man up there and his delivery – never a strong suit – was even worse than usual. unwittingly, no doubt, it gave the impression that his heart wasn’t really in it. He seemed flat and oddly uninterested.

Though McCain talked about the need to fix Washington his essential message that We messed it up, so it’s our responsibility to clean it up may not be quite what voters want to hear when they have the alternative of selecting a party that hasn’t been in power for the past eight years. He tried the insider-as-outsider trick, but before this audience of true believers it didn’t quite catch on.

Did McCain make a compelling case for his candidacy? No, at least to my foreign eyes, not quite. There was no big idea, no really compelling vision, little more, actually, than a sense that McCain’s sacrifices ovr the years, many of them terrible, had somehow earned him the right to be President. But the Oval Office isn’t a lifetime achievement award (cf, George W Bush) is it?

Much of McCain’s speech was standard Republican boilerplate anyway, culled from party platforms of the past and Heritage Foundation fact sheets. True, I liked his rhetoric on school choice, but I don’t beleive a President McCain is going to be in a position to advance that cause very far. Elsewhere, it was the standard GOP talking points on taxes, energy (a strangely, even idiotically, large issue this election).

Even the foreign pollicy section of the speech was oddly perfunctory: just a couple of lines about al-Qaeda and Iraq and then a longer chunk on Russia.

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