A Cynical Eye

I have made a fairly conscious effort to approach the Republican convention with an eye out for its merits, on the assumption that it would probably showcase the McCain campaign at its finest.

The longer I have watched, the more inclined to cynicism I have become.

Those folksy hand-lettered signs the crowd has been holding up? NPR reported this afternoon that they are in fact mass produced...to look like hand lettered signs.

McCain was interrupted early on by several protesters, motivating the crowd to shout them down. How did protesters get to such prominent places on the floor? I have no proof for this one, but in Nixonland Rick Perlstein documents how Nixon would make a point of letting Vietnam protesters into his campaign speeches, so that when they interrupted his speeches with their shouting, the "silent majority" would shake their heads and vote Republican. Considering the security at this event, one does have to wonder.

Credulity is one of my shortcomings, but the Democrats somehow seemed so much more authentic.

McCain's speech was strangly soft in tone. I rather liked his olive branch to the Obama campaign. The admission that the Republicans had lost their way over the last eight years was surprisingly candid. It is certainly starting to look more like the John McCain I held real respect for back in February. But then he turs to the attack. The punchlines are formulaic- taxes bad! Government bad! Small businesses good! The policy specifics so painfully lacking in Palin's speech last night were finally there, and McCain does seem to realize where many solvable problems lie. But his proposed solutions are disappointingly similar to the ones that haven't been working for the better part of a decade.

There just seems to be some aura of frailty about him as he speaks.

What he is doing effectively is presenting a vision of the Republican brand without the hallmarks of the Bush years.

It's remarkable the degree to which Obama has set the tone for their convention- win or lose, this is clearly his election.

But it's hard to move past those manufactured signs. They just aren't the product of a party transformed, or to be more specific, a party prepared not to crassly manipulate the American public to preserve its grasp on as much authority as it can get. For a speech purportedly focused on service and cooperation, McCain still seems to be running to a large degree on his biography. Even if McCain really believes that he can bring a fresh wind to government, his staffing choices suggest that he won't. It's hard to believe that the people who wrote last night's adventure in selective omission were not also the authors of tonight's very different piece, and would be advocating for absolutely anything they thought might win the election, regardless of the damage to the environment, the increase to the deficit, or complete deviation from independent reality. The speech tonight is probably the peak of the McCain campaign thus far- it's a shame he's chosen to surround himself with people whose presence undermines his every claim.

And by the way, why on Earth should the enthusiasm of a hand-picked crowd give commentators any reliable guide to the success of a speech? Convention crowds would applaud any series of words at all presented in a language they could understand. Such "interpretations" are just lazy. Dur!