GOP, McCain Can Run – Not Hide – From Themselves

The Republican Party must change itself before it can credibly offer change to our country.  They just don’t want to believe that yet.  Eight years or more of political oblivion will no doubt clear their minds.

Even John McCain – who decided the experience card didn’t work for Hillary and isn’t going to work for him either in a “change election” – and who offered himself as the change Washington needs last night hasn’t truly reconciled himself to that fact; thus, the two-faced convention and the choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate.  

For three nights the Republicans struggled with their own worst instincts.  They knew they had to show America they were ready to change and offer something different after eight years of the failed Bush presidency.  But ultimately they could barely utter the word change without cringing, let alone demonstrate how they would usher in a new age.  Instead, they decided that the last eight years just never happened.  They wouldn’t mention the recent past and hopefully, with Bush holed up safely in the East Wing and Cheney sent with a bag of cash to Georgia, the American people would just forget about it as well.

The clock was turned back to 1980.  Big-spending liberals, the East Coast media, Hollywood elites, the Russians and crazy Muslims – evildoers all – were mercilessly assailed.  If something was wrong in America it was that conservatism had lost its way.  Like Adam in the garden, the right had been led astray by the temptations of Washington and only if it re-established itself on its founding principles – small government, country, faith – would it find its way again.  

In John McCain and Sarah Palin they had the perfect team to lead them back to the Promised Land.  He’d plant the flag and she’d bring the good book.  And all the Party had to do was double-down on the same tired conservative platform – draped around that ever-waving big-screen flag – and pray that God would see America’s rightful rulers preserved in power, cleansed of the sins of the last eight years.

Or so they’d have it.  Even as McCain lamely tried to reach out past the convention hall, the true colors of his trapped-in-the-past Party faithful were there for all to see the previous evening.  This crowd didn’t want to hear about how America needed to come together.  They didn’t want to listen to how McCain had worked across party lines.  No, they wanted blood.

To paper over the cracks in their own failed ideology they chose to simply skewer the opposition with condescension and sarcasm.  So much for reaching out.  San Francisco.  Community organizers.  Nuff’ said.  

Solutions came in the form of chants proving the assembled no more accepted the threat of climate change or the credibility of science – even if John McCain said he did – than they welcomed mushy bipartisanship.  No better a match of words to person can be found than that between Sarah Palin and DRILL BABY DRILL.  When the McCain-Palin ticket goes down to ignominious defeat, as I believe it will, drilling and babies may be the only thing we remember about her.

No, America is moving on.  It desperately needs to.  We can ill afford another four more years of enemy-making and cultural mud-slinging.  Tax cuts are not a solution to our lack of investment in basic infrastructure and research.  Tough talk is not a foreign policy.  Unlike the people on the floor of the XCEL center – America is younger, browner, greener and still open to new ideas and reason.  Many Americans even want to become community organizers.  Our country wants to believe again.  

Over the past three days, John McCain’s Republicans showed they only believe in themselves and their enemies list.  And while they may be able to run from their record, they cannot hide from it.  A landslide beckons – God willing.  

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