Finally it was time.
The lights grew dim, the arena came to a hush, the video started. Well, to call it a video is stretching it. It was a video full of pans over pictures. We finally got to hear them mention that John McCain was a POW! Stop hiding that information, John. Over the five long minutes of this amateurish production, replete with canned synth strings, stock photos of smiling people (half of which were black) and grain blowing in the wind, the narrator from all your favorite Mac & Cheese ads, and hoary old chestnuts like "Somehow John McCain survived.....perhaps he had more to do" we learned about John McCain. If all you wanted to learn about was his grandfather who died, his time as a POW, lying to his second wife about his age (and vice versa) and almost no mention of the fact that he's been a senator for almost 3 decades.
Then the spotlight hit the stage and some stagehand shoved McCain out into it. He toddled around doing his trademark "double thumbs up Frankenstein", and waving and pointing to people in the delegations he pretended to know. He strode to the end of the stage, reconfigured to look like a giant, angled, neon cock. The stage manager struck a donkey, who started turning a wheel, raising the podium from beneath the neon phallus. It was time for John Fuckin' Sidney Fuckin' McCain!
Then they flashed up a picture of a giant mansion for him to speak in front of. Not the best imagery considering the previous two weeks worth of attacks. The added effect had close cropped shots of McCain looking like he was standing in front of a lime green backdrop. Later reports had this put as a mistake by the jumbotron guy. As McCain started to speak he was interrupted by protesters from several different groups including Iraq Veterans Against the War and Code Pink. The audience turned away from their candidate to manically chant USA at them. Which made sense for the Code Pinker, who was probably a communist, but not for the veteran who served our country and didn't like the war or McCain's voting on veterans issues. That would serve as a theme for the rest of the night, the audience randomly chanting USA for anything that could remotely be tied to the US as a positive. But for a man running on security it didn't look good that his own nomination speech got interrupted 4 times because of lax security.
John finally got his speech underway. A disjointed mishmash of sentences, declarations of qualities he possesses, at most three policies he would enact, and no real theme or structure. The media reviews, if you're in to such things, described it as vague, non-specific, repeating the same old GOP ideas in the same way, flat, and was even described by CNN's Jeffery Toobin as "...the worst speech by a nominee that I've heard since Jimmy Carter in 1980." To me it suffered most of the same problems the whole convention faced: the complete failure to recognize it's the past eight years of Republican rule that have people mad, that there are actual economic problems, the complete lack of anything other than biography and attacks, no specifics on policy, and a tone pitched squarely at the base with no regard to how it might play outside the hall. McCain didn't have all these problems, he didn't attack much and he tried to talk more to the independents, but it was still mostly biography and declaration of qualities he feels he possesses. "John McCain was a POW" doesn't solve the housing crisis.
Throughout the speech, McCain was locked in a "to the death" struggle with his vaunted enemy: the teleprompter. He read things wrong, put the wrong stresses on words, and sometimes read the first half of a word with emphasis as if it were the whole word, before scrambling to say the other half so we knew it was a real word and not one he invented. There was a section, the only section, where McCain listed all the evil things Obama wanted to do, from taxing everything you do or own, putting puppies into wood chippers, and surrendering to Islam and setting up a caliphate. This brought the typical insincere "this is where we have to boo" booing from the crowd. It was on display all night whenever a vaguely liberal or foreign idea was mentioned. For both parties and conventions in 2012, can you tell everyone to stop that? It's annoying.
Senator McCain declared his dislike for partisan rancor, the kind that had been broadcast over the air the previous three nights and had taken place up until he took the stage. The kind he made sure his VP choice had and the kind he puts in his ads and campaign press releases. He's against it. He's also willing to work across the aisle with anyone to wants to come together....to pass his right wing conservative agenda. Because that's what compromise means: Democrats compromising to give Republicans 95% of what they want. Hey it's worked so far, why stop a good thing? John also attempted to hump the change pony to death. See, he's the candidate of change now. And the only way to get true change is to keep the same party in power and champion the same policies that have been enacted over the past eight years. That's change, not Obama's sissy ideas of doing things differently.
Finally, mercifully, the speech came to an end with McCain giving the only energized portion of his speech where he shot out descriptions of what America is in a staccato, rapid fire session which the crowd cheered and chanted over....because it was about the USA, USA, USA, USA. He thanked everyone and his theme song played (yes he has an actual "John McCain" theme song, not kidding) Then the Palins walked out and Heart's Barracuda started playing, then the families came out and everybody hugged, then a trillion balloons fell from the ceiling. If you were watching MSNBC, the balloons completely covered floor reporter Andrea Mitchell as she was trying to give a report and interview Tom Ridge. It was aborted (right to life!) and instead Keith Olbermann, Brian Williams, and Tom Brokaw made fun of her for five minutes until Tom Ridge could be moved to a proper set to do a proper interview with Brian and Tom. It was about this time that Obama was belting out the second chorus of "Living On Prayer" during an impromptu karaoke session at Bon Jovi's house. He was feelin' it.
Thus HurriMcCain 08 is over and we scramble to the finish, where the ten percent of the voters who don't really pay attention to this stuff will decide it. The debates are coming soon, God have mercy on our souls. Policies and answers will be ignored, while posture and tone will be analyzed. You will be made to suffer with us.
Image used under a Creative Commons license from Newshour.
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