McCains address, though largely a repetitive slew of stump-speech lines and worn G.O.P. orthodoxy, reminded us of what we once liked about the guy: his aspirations to bipartisanship, his heroic service in Vietnam, his twinkle. He took his (often inaccurate) swipes at Obama, but, in winning contrast to Palin and Rudy Giuliani, he wasnt smug or nasty.
The only problem, of course, is that the entire thing was a sham.
As is nakedly evident, the speechs central argument, that the 72-year-old McCain will magically morph into a powerful change agent as president, is a non sequitur. In his 26 years in Washington, most of it with a Republican in the White House and roughly half of it with Republicans in charge of Congress, he was better at lecturing his party about reform than leading a reform movement. G.O.P. corruption and governmental dysfunction only grew. So did his cynical flip-flops on the most destructive policies of the president who remained nameless Thursday night. (In the G.O.P., Bush love is now the second most popular love that dare not speak its name.)
Even more fraudulent, if thats possible, is the contrast between McCains platonic presentation of his personal code of honor and the man he has become. He always puts his country first, he told us: Ive been called a maverick. If there was any doubt that that McCain has fled, confirmation arrived with his last-minute embrace of Sarah Palin.
We still dont know a lot about Palin except that shes better at delivering a speech than McCain and that she defends her own pregnant daughters right to privacy even as she would have the government intrude to police the reproductive choices of all other women. Most of the rest of the biography supplied by her and the McCain camp is fiction.
She didnt say no thanks to the Bridge to Nowhere until after Congress had already abandoned it but given Alaska a blank check for $223 million in taxpayers money anyway. Far from rejecting federal pork, she hired lobbyists to secure her town a disproportionate share of earmarks ($1,000 per resident in 2002, 20 times the per capita average in other states). Though McCain claimed she has had national security as one of her primary responsibilities, she has never issued a single command as head of the Alaska National Guard. As for her executive experience as mayor, she told her hometown paper in Wasilla, Alaska, in 1996, the year of her election: Its not rocket science. Its $6 million and 53 employees. Her much-advertised crusade against officials abusing their office is now compromised by a bipartisan ethics investigation into charges that she did the same.
How long before we learn she never shot a moose?
