McCain Convention Speech Wrapup

Tonight, John McCain wrapped up a long two weeks of straight political convention coverage with his closing argument, which seemed almost as long, to the GOP convention in St. Paul. Now the real race begins.

I think McCain gave a convincing narrative of his life and service to the American public tonight. In fact, I’d wager to say that a good quarter of the 45+ minute speech was about his time as a POW which a lot of people will appreciate. The rest of the speech was interesting on a number of levels.

First, the presentation was about as mediocre as a bowl of tapioca pudding; which coincidentally, was the same color as the backdrop behind him for the start of the speech. Throughout the GOP convention, that large screen putting up random images behind the speaker confused me while distracting me from whoever was talking at the time.

Other than the POW narrative, we heard a lot from John McCain tonight about how he’ll shake up Washington and “change” how things work there. That’s great and all, but you can’t be congratulating the President in once sentance (although never mentioned by name) while saying you’d distance yourself from his policies with which you voted with 90% of the time. You can get away with that during a speech to the faithful, but over the course of the next two months, it’s going to be harder to distance yourself from the President and his policies when it’s going to be pointed out that you’ve been a staunch supporter of both for the last eight years.

Same thing with the “I’m going to fight corruption…” lines. That sounds great in a convention hall, but this is coming from someone who was a key figure in the Savings and Loan debacle of the late 80’s. That’s like John Gotti saying he’s going to clean up the streets.

As I predicted, we heard a lot of rhetoric tonight from Sen. McCain. Lots of sarcasm against Barack Obama but very short on what he’d actually do to fight corruption in Washington other than to say he’d fight corruption. Very little on what he’d do to get our economy moving except to say that he’d get our economy rolling. Lots of talk about how he understands how it feels to have your job shipped overseas, but again, the answer seemed somewhat intangible at best. Are manufacturing jobs really going overseas because of taxes? Of course not, but it didn’t matter tonight.

It was all about offering the perception of change while offering up the same old right wing talking points of the last 25 years. Change isn’t about repackaging the same tired policies that have failed America over the past eight years.

You can’t claim to be an agent of change against an unpopular administration when you’ve voted in lockstep with that administration time and time again. But the McCain camp knows that, and it’s why they’re willing to say anything and everything to get people to believe otherwise.

That was the message I heard tonight from the GOP convention. After eight years of a failed administration, John McCain wants the American people to ignore the facts and trust them. Again.

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