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Ed Kilgore has taken a close look at McCain's "introductory" speech and come away a bit unsettled:
I've just read the Meridian, Mississippi speech with which John McCain launched his "biography tour," and found it more interesting and troubling than I expected.Most obviously, I can't recall any major speech by a president or presidential candidate that was devoted so thoroughly to the subject of the speaker's own family background--not just the immediate family (which, for example, was the background theme in Richard Nixon's famous "Checkers" speech, and in Bill Clinton's "Place Called Hope" speech, and is obviously important to Barack Obama's "story"), but the Family Heritage. McCain goes into considerable detail to establish himself as the scion of a very old (by American standards) and very distinguished warrior tribe, whose traditions he first spurned and then half-heartedly embraced, before rediscovering them in the crucible of his imprisonment at the Hanoi Hilton...Maybe this is all ephemeral, and at some point John McCain will abandon the biographical message to focus on policy issues. But Democrats need to understand what he's trying to do in presenting himself as the embodiment of the Prodigal Son seeking to lead the Prodigal Nation back to its heritage of greatness, and react accordingly.Kilgore goes on at length, and is well worth reading. McCain is fascinating in that, though his actual combat experience was in Vietnam, he uses his military heritage and worldview to evoke World War II and the Greatest Generation. As both George H.W Bush and Bob Dole were World War II veterans, this isn't exactly unheard of. What is interesting that both Bush and Dole ran against Clinton, who was forged in the cultural crucible of the Vietnam era, if not in the war itself. And the face-off between those who identified with World War II and those who identified against Vietnam really was bitter. If McCain ends up against Obama, however, we'll see a much different break -- an election between a candidate who identifies with a war, and one who does not. Insofar as Obama has a war, it's the one going on now, the one he voted against and wants to end. it is, in other words, a matter of policy, not culture or history or family or identity. For McCain, war is intertwined with all those things -- which is why he presents himself as, if not the candidate of war, the standard-bearer for warriors.
