His exploratory committee’s website has a transcript of the snoozer at The Federalist Society.  It is rather dull reading.  I can’t imagine how tiresome it would be to listen to someone actually deliver this boilerplate.  If I belong to the Federalist Society, do I really want some pol to come in and start telling me why limited government is important or that the Constitution lists the delegated powers of the federal government?  It might be nice to know that McCain technically knows these things, but do people at the Society really need to have someone else tell them these things?  Presumably they are familiar with the Constitution–hence the name of the Society. 

I know this is a campaign speech in which McCain is rolling out his theme of “common sense conservatism,” but surely he could have engaged his audience with meatier fare than “limited government prevents tyranny” and “the rule of law is important” and other truisms that every conservative learns on Day 1, so to speak, of their education.  Restating basic truths is worth doing when they are challenged and when you are trying to persuade people who do not yet understand things as you do, and there is nothing wrong with preaching to the choir, but there is preaching to the choir and then there is telling the choir the merely obvious.  It’s as if McCain were up there in the pulpit of a church and saying to the congregation with Rowan Atkinson-like diffidence, “Well, we all believe in God, now, don’t we?  Yes, that’s right, God’s pretty important to us here.  Good for us.”  If they had had them, the Federalists might have started throwing tomatoes at the man after a certain point.

The funniest moment comes when McCain starts describing the separation of powers when it comes to declaring war.  (Again, why do you need to rehash things that everybody ought to know already at an occasion like this?)  The irony that he has been a collaborator in subverting the separation of powers in the recent past was apparently lost on him.

He does give an okay spiel (again, not new or interesting to his audience, but competent nonetheless) on why the power of the judiciary must also be limited and constrained under the Constitution and he makes a decent appeal for judicial restraint.  Everyone must have clapped politely at the appropriate places as they murmured among themselves, “Good grief, doesn’t he have anything else to say?” 

He does go on to talk about the war and torture (which he claims he still opposes!), and makes all the usual noises about enemies being on the “wrong side of history,” a phrase so nonsensical that it always makes me cringe.  He even squeezes in a drearily predictable citation of a snippet from the Gettysburg Address (“government of the people, by the people and for the people”) at the very end.  All in all, a rhetorical train wreck.  No wonder his audience was drifting off. 

This is very good news.  If McCain continues to put people off with bad speeches like this, he might very well sink his own candidacy before it gets going.  We can always hope…