John McCain offered Republicans vision rooted in reality, not Barack Obama's empty promises
As the thousands of red, white and blue balloons, the tinsel and the tickertape descended from the rafters on the Republican convention moments after John McCain had finished addressing it, I at last worked out what had been the key difference between this event and the Democratic beano the week before.
The Democrats have a world view based (as Dr Johnson might have put it) on the triumph of hope over experience. The Republicans' is rooted firmly in reality
In Denver, speaker after speaker lauded and coddled one minority group after another and promised the largesse of the American taxpayer would alleviate their misery. In St Paul the message was about all Americans pulling together, getting government out of their lives, and making everyone richer and happier as a result.
When Mr McCain spoke, the faithful were still galvanised and awe-struck by the performance of his remarkable running-mate 24 hours earlier. In that sense anything he could say or do was bound to be an anti-climax. Yet his steady, measured, statesmanlike speech was the perfect complement to her benign but startling demagoguery.
Thus is the flavour of the next two months established. She will eat their opponents alive; he will be there to explain from the apparently limitless fount of his wisdom what will be done on the tree-strewn road ahead. It is a horrible clich‚, but of the two men aiming for the White House, Mr McCain has more of the demeanour of a president. This is nothing to do with his white hair, still less his white skin: it is everything to do with his gravitas and his record.
Some of us thought, and hoped, that he would win the nomination in 2000 over the manifestly inferior George W Bush. The qualities he had then are the same ones that give him the edge over his opponent now: a "story", to use the campaign's favourite word, of genuine heroism, service and leadership; coupled with what are now the first signs of a grasp of what it is possible to do to right America's economic wrongs without first making them considerably worse.
Mr McCain has been on Capitol Hill for 26 years. He not only knows how the system works, he actively despises it and wants to reform it. He brings immense wisdom and good judgment to the table. It is that, rather than a beauty contest based on some celebrity X-factor, that should decide the election on November 4.
In his speech to the delegates in St Paul Mr McCain dealt only in the broad brush. In this, he was rather like Mr Obama in the Broncos' stadium at Denver a week earlier. But unlike Mr Obama, Mr McCain littered his broad brush with odd moments of detail, and clear statements of vital principle. His delivery may have lacked the charisma and sonority of his opponent's, but what he delivered will have connected with tens of millions of Americans, consolidating the shock of the new imposed on them the previous evening by Sarah Palin.
The biggest gap remains his economic programme: he cannot much longer delay explaining how he is going to cut spending, cut the deficit, and provide the tax cuts he promises.
No-one deserves to get a job on Buggin's turn, or on the basis that he or she has been in the queue for it the longest; but that is not what qualifies Mr McCain for the White House. He drew attention to the most important fact about modern life: not the global economic convulsion, from which America has in the last fortnight started to show the first faint signs of recovery, but the fact that the world is a dangerous place, and getting more so. Mr Obama doesn't know where to start on this, and the claims made for his good ol' boy running mate Joe Biden being an expert on foreign policy are charitable to say the least.
In the next eight weeks Mr McCain needs to hammer home the perils to western civilisation not just of Islamic extremism but also of a new Cold War and a restless China. He made a good start yesterday, but this notoriously inward-looking country still needs more of a wake-up call. His television debates with Mr Obama, starting later this month, will be crucial in what must be his strategy of trumping charm and effortless superiority with raw experience.
The convention was a comparatively sober affair, not simply because of the shadow from Hurricane Gustav but because the revivalist hysteria that smothered the Democrats was absent here. But that, of course, is all about the connection Republicans have with reality, practicality running through their veins as idealism does through the Democrats'.
More here
****************************
ELSEWHERE
Iraq victory within sight - Palin: "A US victory in Iraq is "within sight," Republican vice presidential contender Sarah Palin said today. Mrs Palin attributed the imminent success to the surge of troops sent to Iraq last year who have helped quell violence there. She praised war veteran running mate John McCain's strong support for the surge at a time when it was highly unpopular and threatened to derail his campaign for the Republican nomination. "He refused to break faith with the troops in Iraq who have now brought victory within sight," the Alaska governor told an enthusiastic crowd in Sterling Heights, Michigan. "And as a mother of one of those troops that is exactly the kind of man I want as commander in chief." Mrs Palin, whose son will deploy to Iraq next week, attacked rival Barack Obama's opposition to the surge and warned that he would not protect the United States if he were to win the November 4 election. "If the United States military had suffered defeat at the hands of al-Qaeda in Iraq our nation would have been less safe today and millions of innocent would have been left to a violent fate," Mrs Palin said. "That tragedy would have happened if Barak Obama had gotten his way and Congress had cut off funding for the surge."
McCain Camp Attacks Media for Its 'Mission to Destroy Palin': "John McCain's top campaign strategist accused the news media this week of being "on a mission to destroy" Sarah Palin by displaying "a level of viciousness and scurrilousness" in pursuing questions about her personal life. In an extraordinary and emotional interview, Steve Schmidt said his campaign feels "under siege" by wave after wave of news inquiries that have questioned whether Palin is really the mother of a 4-month-old baby, whether her amniotic fluid had been tested and whether she would submit to a DNA test to establish the child's parentage, the Washington Post reports. Arguing that the media queries are being fueled by "every rumor and smear" posted on left-wing websites, Schmidt said mainstream journalists are giving "closer scrutiny" to McCain's little-known running mate than to Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama.... Schmidt spoke on the record in denouncing as "an absolute work of fiction" a New York Times account of the process by which the McCain campaign vetted Palin"
LOL: "But while half of the Republican movement protests that Sarah Palin is being targeted or ridiculed because she is a woman, one suspects the other half, like Mark Steyn, secretly dreams of being field dressed by her."
For more postings from me, see OBAMA WATCH, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
1 comment:
About Nazism being left or right, I think Mises got it right: left and right have never been meaningful political labels. I would say there are people who understand that freedom means laissez-faire capitalism, and then there are the other 99%.
Post a Comment