Last week we watched the national convention of the Democratic Party. This week we witnessed the national convention of John McCain.
And that, I realized while trying to pay attention to McCain's speech tonight, is the real source of difference between the two weeks and the two finales. It's not just that McCain's speech was poorly written (Mark Salter, who is more than a speechwriter but really gave McCain his voice, must have been busy with Sarah Palin's speech), delivered awkwardly to a geriatric Caucasian crowd, and punctuated with smiles and thumbs-up at all the wrong places. It wasn't the Kodak Carousel slideshow running behind him. It wasn't just that even the grace notes were graceless: After declaring of Barack Obama and his supporters, "We honor their achievement" (What achievement? Oh, the whole first-black thing!), he hollered, "but make no mistake my friends, we're the ones who are going to win!" Not, we're the ones with the best ideas or the ones who can best end the war and restore prosperity, just we're-gonna-win.
No, the notable difference, not just in the speeches but in the entirety of the two conventions, was that it is McCain who stands alone. He is the one whose platform is his own personal melodrama, the moment of doubt and pain after which, "I was never the same again. I wasn't my own man anymore. I was my country's." He's the one whose introductory video declared that he "was chosen for this moment," and "the stars are aligned" for his victory. Who's the messiah, now?
But why? Why did McCain, a long-standing senator not without accomplishment or ideas, reduce himself to the idea that the honorable and huge drama of his 20s makes him the man of destiny, while nonetheless assailing Obama as a self-absorbed celebrity?
The answer is not just in the two men or in their speeches but in their parties. The Republican convention was stripped down, marked more by the effort to break itself from its own traditions, history, and recent baggage than by any feel of an actual political party. The party's incumbent president conveniently videoconferenced in, his name was unspoken, and the vice president was forgotten. If the Republican leaders of the House and Senate spoke, I can't find them on the schedule. Their recent predecessors have been all but exiled. The major speeches by Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, and Fred Thompson were consolation prizes.
And yet while McCain used his speech to declare "independence" from the party, it wasn't in the name of any issue or idea -- all of his were standard-issue conservative Republican boilerplate. By declaring independence from the institution of the party, rather than its ideas, the actual "cause greater than himself" or party can only be some mysterious force defined by him alone, and by his biography.
The contrast between the stripped-down, McCain-centric Republican convention and the expanding Democratic world last week could not be more dramatic. For all his charisma, talents, and his own drama of self-creation, Obama emerged last week as more completely the embodiment of a political party than any candidate in recent Democratic history, affirming the point recently made by Dana Goldstein and Ezra Klein. Where the Republicans were shedding embarrassments, controversy and baggage, the Democrats spent the week bringing their own on stage, making peace with them, and drawing out what was good about them. Ted Kennedy and Hillary Clinton have at various times past been the most controversial and divisive figures in American politics, and within the party, but the convention absorbed and honored them. Sen. Robert Casey Jr. of Pennsylvania, whose father had been governor and an anti-choice conservative who refused to endorse the 1992 Democratic ticket, gave one of the sharpest speeches of the convention describing his early embrace of Obama. Former Senate majority and minority leader Tom Daschle presided during a low point of Democratic futility, but rather than sending him to live in the attic as Republicans seem to have done with their own former Senate leader Bill Frist, Daschle is a central figure in the Obama world.
And so Obama's speech a week ago could not only be substantive and serious in a way that McCain's wasn't, it was also deeply rooted in the party, its traditions from FDR through the Kennedys, its various factions, its structures. And by political party, I do not mean partisanship -- as in Sarah Palin's jabbing, vacuous, sarcastic Wednesday speech or McCain's "we're the ones who are gonna win!" -- but the institution that organizes and magnifies the diverse aspirations and public impulses of millions of people. By speaking at the end of a convention that had constructed a real and lasting political party, Obama could speak convincingly about community (the very concept mocked this Wednesday by both Rudy Giuliani and Palin), collective action, and shared responsibility.
Whereas by stripping away in embarrassment all aspects of his own party, by declaring independence without new ideology, and allegiance to nothing but a self-defined notion of "Country First," it was McCain who was left standing alone, the raw individual, resting everything on his own story, his own honor, his own instincts. It was a far bigger claim than the man or his speech could deliver.
