Friday, September 05, 2008

Pretty Good Speech, Very Good Week   [Yuval Levin]

John McCain gave a fine speech, but perhaps the third or fourth best of this convention. McCain was never going to be a stirring and eloquent formal speaker, he was at best going to offer a plain but clear case for himself as an experienced and patriotic agent of reform, and that’s what he did. I’m glad he turned to some particulars, and he did so reasonably well. But the non-programmatic parts were somehow at least as flat as the policy sections, and on the whole the speech was easy to like but hard to love. McCain looked presidential, level-headed, personally impressive, and responsible, and after the depiction of Obama last night perhaps it made sense to just present all that as an implicit contrast to Obama rather than having McCain make the contrast sharp and explicit as Palin did so well.

The speech offered up some of McCain’s more annoying (to me, anyway) tropes, of course, and especially the shallow misguided equation of party with selfishness; and it added a new one to the repertoire: “fight, fight, fight”. But it offered up McCain’s great strengths, too, and above all the biography and the almost chivalrous sense of honor that make him so compelling—as a man committed to America’s security, to rattling the status quo, and to calling Americans to a deep abiding love of their country that should move them to acts of service.

This speech in itself was probably not enormously helpful to him—though it surely did some good. But the convention as a whole was, I think, very very helpful. Rudy Giuliani’s speech last night, which was watched by tens of millions, put the patent weakness of Obama’s claim to the presidency very clearly before the country; and Sarah Palin’s speech advanced the case for McCain (and McCain’s style of politics) more effectively than it has ever been put forward before.

The week since the end of the Democratic convention, which seems now like years ago, has been defined by McCain’s choice of Palin, and at the end of this convention there is simply no question that the choice has done him enormous good. It has rallied conservatives behind him as basically nothing else could have; it created an intense fascination unlike anything seen in American politics in decades that drew an audience of more than 40 million Americans Wednesday night to watch the most compelling performance by a Republican politician since Ronald Reagan; it left the Democrats reeling, at least briefly, and offered the spectacle of their presidential nominee struggling to compare himself to the Republican VP candidate; and it gave the McCain campaign a new coherence and energy. The ugly media frenzy probably did some harm, and much still depends on Palin’s continued performance, but to this point she has transformed the campaign as no VP pick in recent history has, and almost entirely to McCain’s benefit.

For all its anxious moments and uncertainty, this has been a very good week for the McCain campaign.

09/05 12:46 AMShare