What a relief last week to go from the real world of Gustav to the unreal
world of another national nominating convention, full of full of hype and
fury signifying . . . well, that depends on who's talking at the time. As
the drama built up to the well-staged acceptance speeches Wednesday and
Thursday nights, Tuesday evening was just the prelims. But it had two stars:
Fred Thompson was the first. The former senator and prosecutor was utterly
convincing so long as he was praising the record of his party's standard
bearer. It was an easy case to make. Even the opposition has made a ritual
of acknowledging John McCain's heroism before attacking him. ("I honor
Senator McCain's record of service to his country, but . . . .") Who
couldn't recognize John McCain's courage and character? And not just in
uniform. He's been his own man in the U.S. Senate, too, yet able to forge
compromises at critical moments. That, too, takes courage.
It was hard to resist the thought that if only Fred Thompson had campaigned
half so well for himself as he did for John McCain in this speech, he might
have been accepting his party's presidential nomination at this convention.
Indeed, at the beginning of this campaign so long, long ago, I had picked
him and another long shot, a freshman senator from Illinois, as the dark
horses most likely to win their party's presidential nomination. But only
one crossed the finish line.
However different their styles, both men have an engaging way about them,
but Mr. Thompson soon grew bored with all the folderol that goes with being
a presidential candidate, while Barack Obama seemed to rise above it - even
as he accommodated it. How he does it is a mystery, like so much art, but
it's an impressive performance. The magicians, and Senator Obama certainly
is one in his chosen field, call it levitation. It'll be interesting to see
how he pulls it off against down-to-earth John McCain in their first debate.
How strange: It is the Republican ticket in this election that begins to
represent change while the Democratic one, with all its talk of change, and
maybe only talk, begins to look a lot like the old liberal establishment.
Listening to Fred Thompson go on and on, I think: Here he is in the
supporting cast of this convention while John McCain, whom everybody had
counted out at one point, has the starring role.
American politics, like America itself, is full of surprises.
Then, midway in his address, after he's got us convinced, Fred Thompson
shifts gears, even personas, and delivers an old-fashioned Tennessee stump
speech worthy of his origins. At that point Mr. Thompson morphs into Arthur
Branch, the district attorney he used to play on television, spewing
homespun maxims at screenwriter speed. And I'm brought back to unreality.
It's no coincidence that the proceedings at Denver would be dominated by
that huge telescreen telling us what to think, what emotions to feel, what
music to respond to, at every moment. Surely only Disneyworld can match our
major parties at what is now called people-moving, and not just physically.
Fred Thompson may have been the orator of Tuesday evening, but Joe
Lieberman, not surprisingly, was the thinker. To use a word that seems to
have died with the old Greeks, the man is a rhetor - one who seeks not so
much to rally the faithful as to persuade the unconvinced.
Surely the most effective part of the evening came when Senator Lieberman, a
soft-spoken independent in his soul long before he became one in name, asked
his partisan audience's indulgence to say a few words to America's
yet-undecided independents and, yes, Democrats. By which he surely meant
old-fashioned Democrats like himself, dedicated not just to fighting
injustice at home but threats from abroad.
You may remember that kind of Democrat. They used to be called Scoop Jackson
Democrats and, before that, Harry Truman Democrats. You know the species:
the kind of Democrats who, throughout the long, twilight struggle known as
the Cold War, drew the line against tyrants - and would not retreat.\
Everyone knows the one big reason Joe Lieberman is supporting John McCain in
this election: because in the darkest hour in this new long, twilight
struggle that has only begun, John McCain refused to settle for anything
less than victory. Or as he put it at the time, explaining what seemed his
quixotic support for a war that all the Wise Old Heads told us was lost,
he'd rather lose a political campaign than for his country to lose a war.
And sure enough, John McCain's view - and Joe Lieberman's - prevailed at
last, just as American forces are prevailing now, despite what the
oh-so-sophisticated Joe Bidens had assured us was a losing cause.
It would take a "willing suspension of disbelief," Hillary Clinton told us
at a crucial point in this struggle, to think that a new general's new
strategy would have a new result. Well, if she's not a believer by now, she
hasn't been reading the news out of Iraq for the past year.
It was an interesting evening all in all, with its ebbs and flows, its
alterations between appeals to the heart and those to the mind, between the
old shibboleths and reasoned arguments. Convention-watchers Tuesday night
got a camera's-eye view of America's mixed-up political psyche.
But the convention's and the country's mind was clearly elsewhere - on a
lady from Alaska we the people hardly know: Sarah Palin, Sarah Palin, Sarah
Palin. She's the one everyone was thinking about while the speakers droned.
Was she the Church Lady from the old "Saturday Night Live" reprised for our
viewing pleasure, or our own Margaret Thatcher in the making? Just a
one-election wonder a la Geraldine Ferraro, or
the real thing? We were all about to find out.