McCain is McCain

What can you say? He is who he is. And if anyone is wondering if he can come close to soaring oratory of Obama or the directness of Sarah Palin, the answer to that is no.

But first the prelims, and let me ask, what the hell the GOP is thinking? Tom Ridge? Lindsey Graham? Surely they could have spared one guy from the A squad last night to warm up the crowd for McCain: a Romney, Giuliani, or even Huckabee would have worked wonders here. With Cindy McCain's intro, let me just say it did nothing to convince me that the tradition shouldn't be shot ASAP. Unless the plan was to make McCain look good by comparison.

He's not a natural speechifier. His style is slow, monotone and plodding. But I think the handlers worked with that and did what they could. They let McCain be McCain and tried to turn what is a liability (his lack of natural speech skills) into an asset by making him more "real" in comparison. That may have helped, how much we don't know yet.

As an example: When he said he'll veto the first pork barrel bill that comes across his desk "and you will know their names!"... damn if you didn't believe he meant it.

The speech was full of the stuff you would expect. Maverickness, Vietnam, struggles, lifelong effort, and the now-familiar contrast of doing versus talking. All good stuff, but what particularly struck out for me was a section where he went completely and frankly honest to this Republican crowd:

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. We lost their trust when rather than reform government, both parties made it bigger. We lost their trust when instead of freeing ourselves from a dangerous dependence on foreign oil, both parties and Senator Obama passed another corporate welfare bill for oil companies. We lost their trust, when we valued our power over our principles.

We're going to change that. We're going to recover the people's trust by standing up again for the values Americans admire. The party of Lincoln, Roosevelt and Reagan is going to get back to basics.

That really needed to be said. With that line he wins over a large section of Republicans who have become disheartened over what their party has become. In his favor is that he's usually been on the opposite side of his party and that helps here. Also, this speech may be aimed at moderates and as such just doesn't work on folks like me. Very possible. I will be curious as to how it plays around the nation.

Bottom line, McCain is going to run on reform and change, a direct challenge to Obama, but with more resume and much less oratory skill. This is going to be interesting.

He also ended with strong words about keeping fighting and closed very strong. So I think he didn't kill the energy that Palin built up last night, but she clearly is the rock star and he is the grizzled veteran. On that note they also played heart's "Barracuda" Heh.

Tomorrow it's on and McCain has his party behind him.