Watching Washington

GOP Puts Faith In Stories, Old And New

SAINT PAUL, MINN. -- This week's Republican National Convention was dominated by one personality and one personal story. That in itself is not unusual. But in this case, the personality and the personal story did not both belong to the same person.

If you watched any of the convention, you know the story in question was John McCain's ordeal in a prisoner of war camp in North Vietnam 40 years ago. Other elements of his life, including his 26 years in Congress and his plucky bids for the presidency in 2000 and 2008, were mentioned during the course of the week. But the focus always came back to those wrenching years of captivity.

Night after night, speaker after speaker mined this rich vein. Former senator and presidential aspirant Fred Thompson dwelt on the dramatic details of McCain's torture for much of his speech. Others hit the high points.

Some thought the compelling theme was being emphasized early and often so that the candidate himself could be spared the memory in his own remarks on the final night. But not so. The "Hanoi Hilton" nightmare returned in the nominee's acceptance speech, and in the critical role of closing anecdote. Sure enough, many in attendance told reporters afterward that they were moved by this recollection more than by any other part of the speech.

Let's agree that repetition is the soul of political communication. And the McCain campaign was not going to neglect its featured weapon on the last night, the one that traditionally attracts the largest prime time audience. So the POW story dominated throughout the week. And at this point, anyone in the U.S. who remains unaware of it is not likely to be a voter.

But if that story is set aside, the dominating presence at this convention was not McCain but the woman he chose as his running mate, Sarah Palin. Just a week earlier, the 44-year-old governor of Alaska was unknown to most people in the country and indeed to most participants in this convention. Yet by midweek she had ascended to something like the status of an American Joan of Arc.

Palin had a far more natural and kinetic connection to the activists who populated the convention floor than McCain has ever had. She was with them on abortion (favoring a ban even in cases of rape and incest), gay marriage, sex education, guns and a host of other issues. The simple act of choosing her did more to endear McCain to the base of social conservatives than anything he had ever done.

Palin gave the week's most galvanizing speech, delighting the crowd with morsels of policy and hard jabs at Barack Obama and his party. Most of all, she pleased her audience by bearding the media for disrespecting her candidacy.

Surely there has not been another convention so dominated by a vice presidential candidate since the squabble over renominating Henry Wallace in 1944. To buy peace at that wartime convention, the ailing Franklin D. Roosevelt allowed the Southern delegations to bump his leftish No. 2 in favor of a relatively unknown moderate from a border state. That man was Harry S Truman, from Independence, Mo. Within less than a year, FDR would be dead and Truman would be president.

In one of many intriguing moments in her speech, Palin herself made reference to Truman and his sudden rise to prominence. She said she drew inspiration from the example of the man from Independence. And if Truman went into history as an aggressive partisan, he was also one to work across the aisle on foreign policy and national security, a model the McCain camp was eager to invoke.

There have been other controversies over vice presidents, of course. Adlai Stevenson livened the 1956 Democratic gathering by letting the delegates decide his veep. Richard Nixon became a problem for Dwight D. Eisenhower after his selection in 1952 (the occasion for the famous "Checkers" speech) and Dan Quayle for George H.W. Bush in 1988. The greatest fiasco in recent history was the choice of Sen. Thomas Eagleton of Missouri in 1972, who had to leave the ticket after revealing his psychiatric treatment history.

Palin at this point is primarily an asset for McCain, having brought life to his convention and helped him unite his party. But she is also a threat to upstage him, as she surely did here in St. Paul. This is partly because she is both a natural media magnet and a natural media target. The two halves of the ticket scarcely dare to campaign separately for fear that the No. 2 will prove a greater draw than the No. 1.

This fear was borne out a bit on the final night of the convention. Aside from the well-received retelling of his POW stories, McCain seemed less than utterly comfortable with his audience (both in the hall and watching from home). He seemed aware that many in the hall had preferred another, more conservative option (or would have, given the opportunity). After all, McCain sneaked up on many primary voters and sewed up the nomination so early that a full-scale backlash against him never had a chance to develop.

It may be awkward to have a man so little loved by the conservative movement entrusted with the party's ultimate mission: winning and holding the White House. And it is awkward to have his fate in the hands of someone so little known, even to him, until last week.

But if that is the latest price McCain finds he must pay to pursue his goal, well, as he likes to say, he's been through far worse.

11:27 AM ET | 09- 5-2008 | permalink

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