The Never Ending Story

By John Clayton

Originally Published in the Monocacy Monocle, Volume V, Number 10, September 12, 2008.

I am grateful that it is Poolesville Day that occurs every year, and not the presidential election. Four years is fine for presidential campaigns, even though they now last two years. I’m very grateful they don’t occur any more often than they do. This goes double for conventions. I didn’t watch much of either convention, at least not as a percentage of the time they were broadcast. Nothing big gets decided anymore—a few personnel decisions are ratified and some policy pledges are made and forgotten. Mere infomercials for the most part, but admittedly they do have their moments, as we shall see. I found myself switching over to Nationals games during much of the time, and they were winning for once. Perhaps I would have been more disciplined if the TV dial only offered three networks with the convention and a UHF station showing reruns. Ah, the good old days.

Now that each candidate has chosen his running mate, and we are—thank God—in the home stretch, you have to admit that it’s a pretty fascinating match-up. There has been a lot of comment over the fact that each candidate’s selection of a running mate has undermined a core campaign theme. I suspect that when we expect our presidential candidates to be all things to all people, this is inevitable. For Obama, the selection of Joseph Biden undermines that whole change thing that he used to swamp Hillary Clinton. Senator Biden is a capable man with many fine qualities, but he’s going to be tough to sell as an agent for change, whatever that means. For McCain, his attack on Obama for being inexperienced was undermined by his selection of a candidate with even less experience, and it has kicked off a lively debate on the character and nature of different forms of experience that isn’t likely to end any time soon. It also provided impetus for new attacks on Obama’s experience or lack thereof. They have been careful about attacking his experience in the Senate, because it undermines their own candidate, but it appears all of his other resume items are fair game.

I didn’t watch all of the speeches, but I did watch some of the four speeches by the two candidates and their running mates. Joseph Biden’s speech was the most garden-variety political speech of them all. There was nothing wrong with it content- or delivery-wise, but it wasn’t compelling or memorable. Then again, that isn’t what he was brought in for. Barack Obama’s speech won huge points for stagecraft, but otherwise he delivered the basic Democratic Party catechism for the faithful, which I guess is what he and his handlers felt he had to do. Perhaps the criticisms of his being just a speechmaker have made him wary of delivering too much of a barnburner. The Sarah Palin speech was of course the signature event of the four, and I tried to watch as much of it as I could take, but it really wasn’t my cup of tea. The content has been described as “red meat” for the right wing, but I thought of it more as conservative talk radio for prime time; it had that steady tone of sarcastic nastiness so beloved by talk radio aficionados. Obviously, the speech was inspired to fire up the faithful. We’ll see how that plays later.

It will also be very interesting over the next few weeks to see how Sarah Palin’s candidacy progresses. I am somewhat dumfounded that the Republican Party thinks that someone who has unflinchingly espoused the right-wing George Bush credo on almost any issue you can name—abortion, stem cell research, global warming, energy, sex education, religion versus science, environmental protection—will be attractive in a national election. Clearly, they feel that mobilizing the right wing is worth alienating other voters, and I’m sure they’ve done the math. As the media rips into her, she will have some bad days to be sure, but I don’t think she’s going to morph into Danielle Quayle. I have read a fair amount, admittedly in condensed form, about her battles with the entrenched Alaskan alliance of oil companies and helpful Republican officials, including the man who appointed her to a regulatory agency. It might be unwise to underestimate her.

I watched most of John McCain’s speech because the Redskins and the Nationals games were both over, and it was fun watching the crowd try to figure out whether or not they wanted to cheer when he paused for what he obviously thought were boffo applause moments. He did deliver some sure-fire applause lines, but I thought the crowd got fooled a few times when they were called upon to cheer for something more complex than cut-the-taxes and bomb-the-bad-guys. You could really see the wheels turning after a few of McCain’s applause pauses. They never really got their rhythm, and it was nothing like the good ol’ time they had the day before with Governor Palin.

This may be a bit of a stretch, but when I watch all this carefully-manufactured enthusiasm, I recall having read that when Abraham Lincoln was nominated for the presidency in 1860, he not only did not attend the nominating convention, in accordance with the custom of the day, but very few members of his party had the slightest idea what he looked like. Subsequently, as he began to meet more and more people during his campaign (also a limited endeavor in those days), there was great shock at his appearance, as he was, let’s face it, rather strange looking. Nevertheless, this was no great impediment to his being elected. He also wrote his own speeches. I would say our criteria have changed significantly.

Editor’s Note: Commentaries represent the opinion of the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of Monocacy Press, LLC and this newspaper.