McCain is no Obama

As Paul Demko points out in the previous post, John McCain just gave one of the worst victory speeches I've ever heard. He walked in to the Rocky theme and the excitable crowd interrupted him several times with chants of "Mac is back!" (which at first sounded like "Pack his bags!"). He started off with a joke alluding to Bill Clinton's "comeback kid" victory, saying that though McCain is too old to be called a kid, "tonight, we sure showed 'em what a comeback looks like!" But after that, McCain seemed to fall apart, reading from an obviously written speech and several times stammering through language that clearly wasn't his own.

"The don't send us to Washington to stroke our egos," McCain intoned, "but to keep this beautiful (long uncomfortable pause as he squints at the text) beautiful?, blessed country safe, prosperous and proud." Working this theme, McCain got lost in his double negatives and pronoun confusion, saying of voters: "They don't help a single family realize the dreams we all dream for our children, that don't help a single displaced worker find a new job ..." Then McCain again struggled with the text, saying, "I seek the nomination of our party to restore that trust, to return our property--our party to the principles that have never failed Americans."

Where Obama promises "the audacity of hope," McCain's most rousing line was, "We are the makers of history, not its victims."