Senator McCain, I think, needs to achieve several things with his speech tonight. The first is to simply look good in his delivery. He needs to read well from the teleprompter, look vigorous and seamless rather than robotic in his presentation, and do away with the endless “my friends” references. In other words, McCain needs to be the opposite of what he was during his ill-fated New Orleans speech back in June.
Second, having affixed an extremely effective narrative on Obama — inexperienced, a man of no impressive legislative accomplishments, a world celebrity rather than a serious presidential candidate, and the world’s most famous community organizer–McCain now needs to create one for himself. The obvious one for McCain, and the one that drove the selection of Governor Palin, is that he and Palin will be authentic agents of change. The message needs to be: Obama may talk about change, but there is only one ticket we can count on to clean the Augean Stables.
For this to succeed, McCain needs briefly to acquaint voters with his own record of reform. He needs to build confidence among the public that he and Palin can do in the future what they have done in the past. And then McCain, having committed himself to reform our public institutions to meet the demands of this decade, should sketch out a comprehensive reform agenda. (See my colleague Yuval Levin’s Weekly Standard article for chapter and verse on this.)
A third, related task: McCain needs to give voice to the mistakes and waywardness of the GOP in recent years. Showing that he “gets it” will help him in his effort to say the party needs to be different than it has been, and pledge its fidelity to certain basic Republican truths.
Fourth, McCain needs to convince voters that on issues they are concerned about in their daily lives–energy costs, taxes, and health care are three obvious ones–McCain has concrete plans to make their lives better. McCain has to appeal to what he sometimes seems to (wrongly) think is an ignoble sentiment: enlightened self-interest. I also agree with William Kristol and Daniel Casse: McCain should, in Daniel’s words, “flesh out a specific policy proposal on helping families with special needs children to build on those magnificent, evocative lines in Palin’s speech.” This would be an emotionally powerful, and appropriate and useful, thing to do.
Fifth, McCain needs to use his own life story to convince people that he is ready for one more, and one last, great act of service to his nation. People need to come away from this speech associating McCain with these lovely sentiments (as expressed by George Washington in his First Inaugural address): “I was summoned by my Country, whose voice I can never hear but with veneration and love.”
People cast votes for largely prosaic reasons. But in casting votes for President, more than any other office, they rely on issues of character. The Founders believed the office of the Presidency should be filled by people whose “reputation for integrity inspires and merits confidence” (see Federalist #64). People watching tonight need to see in John McCain what the Founders hoped to find in the chief executive: an individual of good judgment guided by a single, simple, and unbending devotion–love of country. And then Mr. McCain needs to hope his countrymen will summon him to once again to serve the nation he loves so much.
