Oral Exam, Part II

MICHAEL WALDMAN
After all that, after Sarah Barracuda and Obama's epic poem, John McCain gave a speech that was disjointed, sometimes strikingly independent, mostly flat.

McCain seemed fully aware of his political imperative: distance himself from a presidency widely regarded as a failure. The strategy is, to borrow a phrase, audacious. It requires courage and uncommon focus to pull off. Instead, he repeatedly flinched from taking the argument to its logical and lethal conclusion, torn between winning over the crowd and denouncing it.

We heard flashes of strength. McCain opened with a twinge of Truman: "We're going to win this election!" (Truman added in 1948, "and make these Republicans like it—don't you forget that!" McCain left that out.) Like FDR, he declared, "I hate war." There were a few passages of sustained eloquence—a smidgen of  "America is an idea" here, a dollop of American exceptionalism there. It is hard to analyze the poetry, since there wasn't much of it.

Most striking was the passage scalding the Republican Party for its past lassitude. In recent decades, Democratic nominees have felt it necessary to insist they are not like other Democrats. Obama, less popular than his party, set out to prove that he was, in fact, like other Democrats. Like Democrats of yore, McCain's task was to show he was a "different kind of Republican." His audience did not seem delighted to serve as foils for a "Sister Souljah" moment. To a sullen silence, McCain declared, "I fight to restore the pride and principles of our party. We were elected to change Washington, and we let Washington change us. We lost the trust of the American people when some Republicans gave in to the temptations of corruption."

Making a break is part of the ritual of conventions: Al Gore announced he was his "own man," and Hubert Humphrey waited until weeks before the election to open any daylight between himself and LBJ on Vietnam. I can't remember a nominee working so hard to push away the sitting president of his own party. Note that his distancing from his party does not go so far as setting out a new or more centrist agenda. He generally advances orthodox Republican policies. In that way, McCain missed a signal moment. Reform remained a lofty generality.

He attacked partisan rancor (though he shrank from a serious analysis of why there is such discord). Such discord happens, he said, when "people work for themselves, not you." At the risk of being a churlish former speechwriter, that's just rhetoric. What really has caused Washington to go so far off track? What is the role of big money in politics? McCain has built a real record as a reformer in years past, but he did not spell out the next phase of change. Denouncing rancor may appeal, and may poll well with swing voters, but after the vitriolic speeches by Rudy Giuliani and (with a smile and a pout) Sarah Palin, rancor definitely had an Honored Guest pass at the convention.