From Salon
By Joe Conason

John McCain deserved much better from his campaign staff than he got when they handed him that jumbled convention speech and set him out onto that strange stage. Even though many of the men and women who work for him undeniably belong to that “old, big-spending, do-nothing, me-first, country-second Washington crowd” he scorns, there can be no doubt that they love him, so they should not have let him down so badly. His staff and advisors have had two years to prepare for that moment — and they gave him words that literally put people to sleep.

Only the mighty force of McCain’s personality saved Thursday night’s event, the culmination of his political life to date, from disaster. Physically damaged, mentally tough and emotionally open, he is often compelling and effective. It can be touching to watch him express himself. But on this occasion he was burdened by the contradictions of his campaign as well as the emptiness and incoherence of his program.

Of course, his handlers may well have felt that they didn’t need to craft a speech telling us what the maverick actually intends to do as president because — as Rick Davis admitted the other day — they think this election is about cultural divisions rather than issues. Evidently they also believe that if McCain simply says the word “change” often enough, he can pilfer the Democratic theme.

Perhaps those tactics will win over voters with short attention spans, but at least some people are likely to ask what McCain means when he talks about change. The problem is not that he lacks credentials as a critic of both his own party’s corrupt culture and Washington’s broader pathologies, but that he has abandoned so much of what once marked him out as different.

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