At what point did the McCain campaign decide that earmarks — seriously, earmarks — are the single most important issue in the campaign? ~Steve Benen

I can’t give an exact date, but at least as far as domestic policy is concerned I believe it must have been in March or April 2007, or at least no more than a few weeks after McCain’s announcement of his candidacy.  By the fall of 2007 one of his favorite shots at the Democrats was his line (“I was tied up at the time”) about the earmark for a museum in Woodstock that Clinton had supported.  Throughout the primaries McCain’s main line of criticism against the GOP was that it had engaged in too much wasteful spending, by which he meant spending earmarked for various pork projects, and for most of 2008 the issue for McCain, as well as the House minority leadership and many Republican pundits, has been reformingearmarks.  One reason for this preoccupation has been the utterly mistaken impression that the 2006 midterms were a punishment for the GOP’s excessive use of earmarks.  (To his credit, the head of the NRCC, Tom Cole, has acknowledged that earmarks had nothing to do with the defeat in ’06.)  Naturally, having made this practically the centerpiece of his domestic agenda (before drilling became the obsession), he chose a soul running mate reputed for her acceptance of earmarks that McCain himself considered wasteful.  Of course, it is a testament to the establishment nature of the GOP leadership and of McCain himself that something as insiderish and obscure to most voters as earmarks has acquired such centrality in the Republican presidential campaign.  Nothing says that the GOP has been in power too long better than its insistence that its main failing was attaching too many pork projects to its legislation.

You remember that? For it before you were against it? I mean you can’t just make stuff up. You can’t just recreate yourself. You can’t just reinvent yourself. The American people aren’t stupid. ~Barack Obama

Look, let me talk about the broader issue, this whole notion that I am shifting to the center.  The people who say this apparently haven’t been listening to me. ~Barack Obama

As the man said, you can’t just reinvent yourself.  However, it may not be true that the people won’t fall for it.  At the Democratic convention, they had Kerry give an effective attack on McCain’s own many flips and inconsistencies over the years, deploying the “for it before you were against it” line against McCain, so it is clear that Obama and Biden are counting on a public backlash against McCain and Palin’s opportunism.  Still, it is difficult to take advantage of opponents who are unscrupulous trimmers when you are no different, and it is hard to indict your opponents as advocates of “more of the same” when you represent accommodation and support for so much of the status quo.

Richard quotes from Walter Block, who has apparently taken leave of his senses:

True confession time. Before Palin (BP), I was leaning toward Obama. I thought he was marginally less likely to drop a nuclear bomb on some hapless third world country than mad bomber McCain. I regarded, and still do, foreign policy as more important than domestic, given that “war is the health of the state.” And, there was very little to choose between the Republocrats and the Demopublicans on economics. Socialism from both quarters (although I admit it, the prospect of Alan Dershowitz on the Supreme Court did give me pause for thought). But now, after Palin (AP), I am shifting my allegiance to the Republicans.

In other words, even though he regards foreign policy as more important than domestic policy, GOP domestic policy is not sufficiently different to merit consideration and the Palin choice changes absolutely nothing about GOP foreign policy–Mr. Block does not even make the effort to claim otherwise–it must be time to back the GOP.  Mr. Block joins those wavering Obamacans and other right-wing hopers in being swayed into supporting a GOP nominee whose policies they found so objectionable that they were almost driven to support a left-liberal Democrat, only to yield in the final stretch because Mrs. Palin (that Mrs. is all-important, it seems) has arrived.  It doesn’t make sense, and it is pretty clear that everyone knows that it doesn’t make sense, which is about par for the course with the electorate this year.  After all, a significant bloc of anti-Bush and antiwar conservatives voted for McCain in the primary–never mind that he backed Bush on pretty much every major policy of the last eight years–so it shouldn’t be too surprising if they back McCain/Palin.  It does seem harder to understand support for this ticket when it comes from a Rothbard-invoking, Bourne-quoting, high-information libertarian professor.  You will not be surprised to read elsewhere in his column that he hallucinates the possibility of Palin appointing Ron Paul to be Vice President in the event that she succeeds to the Presidency and considers this within the realm of possibility.  Mr. Block is also compelled to make this outlandish claim:

The Barr-Root ticket is arguably less libertarian than Sarah Palin.

That would be an interesting argument to read, since I’m fairly certain it would involve dwelling on Barr’s past record that he has repudiated and ignoring everything Palin has had to say about foreign policy and the treatment of detainees since she became the VP nominee.  Suffice it to say, I am planning to vote for Barr.  For some reason opposition to the PATRIOT Act, Real ID and the FISA bill seems better than support for these things, which is what a vote for McCain or Obama means. 

Mr. Block’s confession is an example of what I was talking about earlier today.  I can understand a pro-life foreign policy hawk* finding a McCain/Palin ticket to be very exciting and worth supporting–it is the new fusionism in action.  I understand that most people who call themselves conservatives and most people in the GOP would fit this description, so in this narrow sense I do see why there has been an enthusiastic response from all those who already think McCain’s bellicosity is a plus.  Iraq War/Culture War is a pairing that satisfies most members of the party, and if social conservatives are content to have their priorities ignored in exchange for a little symbolism they have found their dream ticket.  Even though poll after poll during the primaries showed that Republicans wanted a Repblican in the mold of Reagan and insisted that Bush was not such a Republican, Bush’s approval numbers among Republicans remain shockingly good even now (see question 5 crosstabs) and in the average Republican’s view it is not really an indictment of McCain and Palin to say that they represent Bushism.  On the contrary, it would be considered a compliment.  If Bush did not attend the convention thanks to a timely excuse of having to cope with hurricane relief, this was a tactical distancing of the party from the man an overwhelming majority of the delegates would still regard as a successful, unappreciated President (no, really!).  So I can wrap my mind around the activist and rank-and-file response, but I confess my complete bewilderment when I read something like what Mr. Block has written. If Rothbardians respond with this kind of gushing, regular Republican voters would have to go overboard just to keep up. 

*Whether it is consistent to be pro-life and to be in favor of all the things many hawks favor is another question, but not one that can be resolved here.

But one sign in Albuquerque may have summed it up for Republican stalwarts: “Sarah — you had us at hello.” ~The Los Angeles Times

That really is the point, isn’t it?  All Palin had to do was to show up, and these people were overjoyed regardless of what Palin had or hadn’t done.  Much of the enthusiastic response from rank-and-file Republicans seems to be based in a simple desire for validation from the higher-ups, and in satisfying this disturbing hunger for approval it is as if all of McCain’s errors are forgiven and forgotten.  This is exactly what Bush thought would happen when he nominated Harriet Miers on the assumption that evangelicals and religious conservatives would see her as one of them, and to some extent that is what happened.  When the Bush administration tried to browbeat critics of the Miers nomination (which, I must stress, was a terrible nomination) with accusations of sexism and elitism, the same kinds of people who are now flinging those charges at Palin’s critics were outraged and became even more fiercely opposed to Miers.  

For a long time I have railed against the irrationality of mass democracy–this was one of the early themes of this blog–and I fully subscribe to the Kuehnelt-Leddihn view that democracy is inherently identitarian and therefore at odds with an order capable of respecting political diversity and liberty.  We have not really seen such an unbounded irrational response (both pro- and anti-) to a political figure, except perhaps to Obama post-Wright or maybe to the Clintons in the ’90s, in recent memory.  Certainly there has never been such a sudden, dramatic polarization over a politician as there has been in the last ten days over Palin that I can recall.    

It is possible to resist the lures of different nostrisms that try to seduce you into ignoring policy and focusing on markers that show your political tribal allegiance, but most people respond to the cues they are given and the provocations made against their “side” in any given political contest with remarkably little resistance.  The same people on the right who happily derided Huckabee as ignorant hick who should have gone back to the backwoods praise Palin to the skies for the very traits that were supposed to be disqualifying for Huckabee.  The same people who pushed Romney’s candidacy until its failure was undeniable now preach the importance of Palin’s authenticity!  Even those who have warned against conservatives trapping themselves in a cocoon are pulledinto it, perhaps on the grounds that butterflies eventually emerge from cocoons. 

In fairness, it is certainly easier to resist the urge to rally ’round a party’s candidate when you have numerous, strong objections to the policies defended by the leaders of that party.  It is not as tempting to support someone out of an instinct to defend shared values and culture when you assume that the entire exercise is something of a scam.  When you take it for granted that the pander is designed to sucker people into endorsing policies that are directly detrimental to the very way of life and culture in question, you feel less inspired to defend this or that politician against attacks from the left.  On the other hand, if you are still under the impression that the GOP takes cultural conservative concerns seriously and does not simply use them as election-time bait, you may think it is really important to defend Palin.  Sure, you may say, reflexive loyalty, groupthink and a failure of critical thinking may have brought conservatives to their present state, but this example of reflexive loyalty, groupthink and failure of critical thinking is vital for the greater good.

When the finger is pointed at somebody else, she’s all for accountability. When it’s pointing at her, it’s different. Sarah Palin was elected on the basis of providing open and honest government. She has failed miserably. ~Andree McLeod

David Corn has some information on Ms. McLeod’s efforts to get the Palin administration to release withheld emails that the administration has claimed fall under executive privilege.  Some of them emails refer to Andrew Halcro, who opposed Palin in the gubernatorial election in 2006 as an independent.  Halcro himself also has a worthwhile post on Palin’s relationship with the oil industry and her feted natural gas pipeline-that-isn’t:

Since becoming Alaska’s governor in December of 2006, Palin’s administration has had a very combative relationship with the oil & gas industry in Alaska and has ignored any attempts to communicate with them on development issues.

When the Alaska Gasline Inducement Act (AGIA) was introduced and passed by the legislature in 2007, the administration refused to entertain suggestions from the producers to make the process more commercially viable. At the end of the day the state had crafted a proposal that ignored all legal and fiscal realities. [bold mine-DL]  

So instead of negotiating with the producers, the administration said they’d rely on public and share holder pressure to force three of the largest oil companies in the world to commit to paying for the most expensive privately financed project in the history of the United States.

Even United State Senator Ted Stevens raised serious concerns  about the process back in March saying; “financing terms won’t be set by the legislature, the governor or the Congress. They’re going to be set by the people who manage the money.”

Today, the state has awarded a $500 million inducement and exclusive rights to TransCanada, while their CEO is on record as saying that they cannot order one piece of steel pipe without first gaining the financial support from the oil companies. “Nothing goes ahead unless Exxon is happy with it,” CEO Hal Kvisle told the Toronto Globe and Mail in August.

The pipeline in question is one of Palin’s top items in the speeches she gives in which she lays out how she has fought the oil industry, which obscures that her poor relations with the industry and handling of the project have helped to delay the very project she brags about supporting.  Meanwhile, since she signed a windfall profits tax into law as governor, she makes about as effective a critic of Obama’s proposal to do the same as Mitt Romney would have been on nationalized health care. 

Many of the withheld messages were copied to Todd Palin, which throws the claim of executive privilege into doubt.  Among those copied to Todd Palin were messages pertaining to the Public Safety Employees Association, the union for state law enforcement officers.  The controversy over alleged pressure to fire the ex-brother-in-law, Wooten, had an effect on the administration’s relationship with the PSEA:

John Cyr, executive director of the Public Safety Employees Association, which represents Alaska’s law enforcement officers, said the governor’s grudge against Wooten clouded her judgment and led her to hold down trooper salaries and other funding.

“The trooper budget was held hostage because they wouldn’t fire Mike Wooten,” Cyr said.  

Obviously, we have to take all of this skeptically, but if Cyr’s allegation is correct that could make the firing of Monegan just one part of a pattern of abuse of power relating to this trooper controversy.

Despite some early unfounded hopes, there was never likely to be much in a Palin selection that would satisfy Ron Paul supporters, and a fair amount from what we do know about her that would create cause for serious concern.  Here is one account from a Republican who supported Ron Paul in the Iowa caucuses that describes his dissatisfaction with the convention, John McCain and Sarah Palin.  I am less put off by some of the shots at Obama than this man was, but two things do stand out in his complaint about this past week that I think are quite important:

The worst, for me, was repeated harpings on the idea that Barack Obama was somehow “bad” because he was a community organizer.  

I know what community organizers do.  I have friends and family who are involved with social work and community organization.  They register people to vote.  They get people involved with the political process.  They know the real, day-to-day problems of the people in their community like the back of their hand.  They help people with their life problems, helping elderly folks keep the lights on and helping gro ups with a significant problem get organized enough to get the attention of an alderman or city hall.  The people on the ground, the “community organizers” and very local politicians, do a ton of good work for the people of this country.  And through that process, they gain a deep understanding of the real problems and thoughts of everyday people.

One of the oldest, and still one of the best, retorts against supporters of the welfare state and centralism has been that private institutions and local communities are often better suited to the work that the central government takes over from them, and they help ensure that power is not concentrated in distant and unaccountable bureaucracies.  They create intermediate institutions that can shield the people from the power of the state and provide support from fellow citizens on a local level that frees people from dependence on the state.  Conservatives may have reasons in specific cases to object to the goals or the agenda of particular organizers or groups, and I can see why conservatives would be suspicious of anyone who makes activism into a career.  Another reason why so many conservatives seem to react to the phrase “community organizer” with such bafflement and amusement is that so many of the people engaged in the work of conservation, historic preservation and local community life are not self-styled, much less movement-oriented, conservatives.  As Jeremy Beer said in the TAC symposium from 2006:

The conservers, preservers, savers, and protectors—conservatism once stood for such folks, and such folks were at one time conservatives. But they make bad apparatchiks. They aren’t ideologically motivated and aren’t “thinking big.” They are simply concerned, if often locally prominent, citizens. They may also be sentimental saps, but that’s understandable. As normally functioning human beings, they have formed dear attachments to their social and physical worlds. They like their communities, want to see them thrive and prosper, want to see them made or kept beautiful, want to preserve (or reinvigorate) their sense of their places as unique, and prefer to interact daily with people they know and love—or even hate.

Here is where Russell Kirk was truly exemplary. He ought to be remembered not as “the principal architect of the postwar conservative movement,” as the quasi-official adulation has it, but because he went home. There he restored an old house, planted trees, and became a justice of the peace; took a wife (and kept her) and had four children; wrote ghost stories about census-takers and other bureaucrats getting it in the neck; took in boatpeople and bums; and denounced every war in which the U.S. became involved—especially the first Gulf War, which he detested. And he also denounced abstractions because he knew they were drugs deployed to distract us from the infinitely more important work of the Brandywine Conservancies of the world.

No doubt there are some, indeed many, community organizers who are co-opted by parties and are turned into GOTV agents for politicians, and I can understand not being sympathetic to this kind of activist, but at some point there ought to be some recognition that these people are engaged to some extent in local self-government, which is something that we are supposed to consider important and vital to our political system.  I can understand the critique of Obama here on the grounds that, by his own admission, his time as a community organizer was largely a flop, but surely the point here would be that Obama was not successful at what he tried to do rather than that the sort of work he was attempting was inherently worthless.

The other objection this Paul supporter makes is more important, because it reflects how readily Palin recites the lines she has been given on major issues:

There was one line at the end that really twisted things for me.  “Al Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America … he’s worried that someone won’t read them their rights?”  

This is a fundamentally misleading framing of the issue of providing detainees with the ability to challenge the charges against them through a judicial process.  There is no one proposing that Miranda warnings be given to members of Al Qaeda, and it is an insult to the audience’s intelligence to claim that this is the issue.  The question is whether the government has the right to seize someone, whether a foreigner or a U.S. citizen, accuse him of conspiring with terrorists, strip him of all legal protections and keep him detained indefinitely without access to due process.  The McCain/Palin position is apparently that the government can and should do this–remember that McCain regards Boumediene as one of the worst Supreme Court rulings in history–and meanwhile it is going to be the practice of the GOP to misrepresent the opposing view in the most absurd way.  Unlike this Iowa Paul supporter, these things do not inspire me to vote for Obama, much less to send him money or change my registration, since Obama has shown elsewhere that he has equally little respect for constitutional protections, but they do confirm me in my view that McCain/Palin represents nothing but continuity with the policies of the Bush administration.  I think it is clear for these and other reasons that dissident conservatives have no business lending this ticket any support.

Responding to Scott’s column on Palin, Rod concludes his post with this:

I caught some of her speech today live on CNN at a McCain-Palin rally in Colorado Springs, and she was droning on about John McCain in the Hanoi Hilton, using the exact same lines we’ve heard from the convention. She’s got to do better than that. How about talking less about who y’all are — which is impressive, and legitimately part of your pitch — and more about what y’all are going to do?

Well, yes, but what would they say after the first five minutes were up?  With the exception of a few nods to job retraining and school choice, and, of course, drilling and solidarity with Georgia, McCain’s own speech was blessedly free of talking about anything remotely resembling an agenda.  When she wasn’t making a fool of herself warning against the Great Venezuelan Embargo, Palin was, perhaps more understandably, similarly bereft of policy ideas in her speech.  Oh, but I believe she was in favor of drilling.  I did get that impression.  When the theme of the convention seems to have been, “Drill, baby, drill,” which is an energy policy in exactly the same way that, “Tax, baby, tax” is a fiscal policy (i.e., it isn’t), slogans are obviously all that the party has left.  Even if you think that increasing oil exploration and supply through more offshore drilling makes sense, you cannot really take these people seriously.  After months of mocking Obamaphiles for their ridiculous catchphrases and cultish chants, the Republicans have finally found the chants they can believe in.  The real trouble is that the people on the ticket are not saying much more than the chanting crowds.

However, that’s been the m.o. of the McCain campaign since last year: biography politics together with sloganeering and rote talking points instead of policy substance.  This was more or less how McCain’s primary campaign went: “Surge! Victory! Surge, Earmarks Are Bad, Surge, I Was a POW, Victory, Tax Cuts, Surge, Cause Greater Than Oneself, Surge!”  Since securing the nomination, he has not given many major policy addresses.  One of the few that he did give involved laying out his mad confrontational foreign policy vision, which has now boiled down to vilifying Russia and sabre-rattling against Iran.  A candidacy built almost entirely on the appeal of biography and character is not going to turn into a campaign that lays out a serious policy agenda.  As I have noted before, the danger is that the less wonkish, less policy-oriented candidate is unfortunately the person who wins presidential elections.  It is frustrating for the journalists, pundits and bloggers who follow the campaigns, but the reason why the McCain campaign’s focus is inordinately on biography is that the candidate who sells himself on his biography will usually prevail over the wonk.  It worked for Obama against Clinton, and it has already worked for McCain once this year.  However, in a race against Obama I’m not sure that the McCain/Palin combination of biographies will be enough. 

When McCain doesn’t know much about policy, and the VP nominee has to be brought up to speed to be on McCain’s level of policy ignorance, their speechwriters aren’t going to burden them with a lot of specific details, since these might prompt questions and require the candidates to understand what they just said.  When McCain does not understand that his own preferred policy of cap-and-trade involves mandatory restrictions on emissions, can’t keep straight which forces Iran is supposed to be backing inside Iraq and admits that he knows little about economics, first among the many other subjects about which he knows little, what is he going to talk about?  He will talk about being held captive and he will talk about reform–beautiful, nebulous, undefined reform.  Not to mention drilling.

It isn’t Kucinich-level mismanagement of a municipality, but the story about Wasilla’s relatively enormous debt burden that Palin left the town with from her time as mayor has to give Palinites pause.  If the idea is that she can do for the federal budget what she did for Wasilla’s, the possibility that she might well become President at some point in the next four years is unsettling.  We are indeed, as Peggy Noonan quoted, a nation of Wasillas, and this is even more true when you consider our tendency to spend money we don’t have.  Yes, Sarah Palin really is one of us when it comes to getting irresponsibly buried in debt–or, in this case, getting other people irresponsibly buried in debt.  Mind you, this is the same mayor whose town received $27 million in earmarked federal funding, and thanks to her projects the town is now $20 million in debt.  In carrying out some of those “actual responsibilities” Palin talked about on Wednesday, it seems that she made a hash of things in her drive to have a hockey rink/athletic facility built in the town.  Because of what appear to be avoidable blunders (in particular, the failure of the city to sign the appropriate documents relating to the purchase of the needed land), the result for the town came in the form of higher costs, litigation, considerable lawyers’ fees and a pile of debt:

The only catch was that the city began building roads and installing utilities for the project before it had unchallenged title to the land. The misstep led to years of litigation and at least $1.3 million in extra costs for a small municipality with a small budget. What was to be Ms. Palin’s legacy has turned into a financial mess that continues to plague Wasilla.

In addition to the considerable amount of debt that Wasilla’s voters took on with the bond issue to pay for the facility, costs from the project continue to mount:

Litigation resulting from the dispute over Ms. Palin’s sports-complex project is still in the courts, with the land’s former owner seeking hundreds of thousands of additional dollars from the city.

After Palin left office, the town finally acquired the land through eminent domain.  The property had already been purchased by someone else while the town dawdled in finalizing the deal with the Nature Conservancy, and in order to settle with the owner the town had to pay more than $700,000 extra plus interest for the same parcel of land that they had originally negotiated to acquire years before.  Remember that this is one of the major accomplishments of Sarah Palin’s tenure as mayor.

George Packer gets close to the truth, but then veers rather badly off course:

He gambled, all right, but it was in the direction of orthodoxy—for Palin is a creature and an icon of the Republicans’ evangelical base, which came into full possession of the Party this week and completed the G.O.P.’s conversion to identity politics.

What Packer misses after coming so close is that religious, and specifically evangelical, identity politics did not triumph in the GOP this year.  The pseudo-conservative Mormon and the secular neoconservative received close to two-thirds of the GOP delegates in this year’s contest, movement elites actively opposed “the evangelical candidate” and most evangelical leaders, as I noted before, made a point of not basing their endorsements (if they made any at all) on shared religious views.  Indeed, one could say, and it has been said before, that Huckabee’s ghettoization as “the evangelical candidate” showed the very clear limits of a campaign that was portrayed as being entirely driven by religious identity.  It is important to remember that while Huckabee’s most reliable cohort of voters were evangelicals, he generally campaigned as the generic working-class social conservative (which is why sometimes people mistook him for a new Buchanan and consequently misrepresented him as hostile to free trade agreements) and proceeded to lose badly in every state where evangelicals did not make up a large part of the primary electorate.  Part of this failure was caused by resistance to a Southern candidate outside places that were culturally Southern or caucuses that had large evangelical blocs, part was caused by precisely the sort of class-based derision aimed at Huckabee’s background that is now deployed against Palin’s (the difference being that it was conservative elites doing the deriding during the winter months), part was based in exaggerated claims about Huckabee’s deviations from economic conservatism (which were no worse than the movement champion of Romney) and part was based in legitimate critiques of Huckabee’s immigration record and “compassionate” conservative rhetoric.  A crucial part in resisting Huckabee was the party’s desire to keep evangelicals from having one of their own in charge of the entire party; putting one of them on as the VP is more acceptable, since it reinforces the message that evangelicals should always take second place to the “national security” conservatives–the “national greatness” and neoconservative elements of the coalition–and makes sure that their priorities are always subordinated to the foreign policy agenda of those elements.  As with Bush, some neoconservatives have expressed concern with her lack of foreign policy experience, but the example of Bush’s flight away from the foreign policy realism of his father’s advisors has to be reassuring to them and Palin’s own natural “pro-Israel” inclinations will give them no cause for concern. 

Huckabee was personally too much like Bush for many people, but in terms of policy the most Bushian of the primary field was clearly McCain, and it was ultimately Bushism–not Romney’s three-legs-of-the-stool-ism or Fred Thompson’s “back to Reagan” revival–that prevailed in the primaries and again in the VP selection.  I mean, how has no one made this point already?  McCain provides the basic policy trajectory of a third Bush term, and Palin provides the biography of a folksy pro-life “reformer with results” governor of a large, oil-rich reliably Republican state in the West–it is pretty close to the Bush/Cheney ticket in reverse, isn’t it? 

The Palin choice was essentially a bow to current movement orthodoxy, but what does that mean after eight years of Bush?  What Ross said last year remains true today:

Since the Republicans’ stinging defeat in the 2006 midterm elections, Bush’s distinctive ideological cocktail—social conservatism and an accommodation with big government at home, and a moralistic interventionism abroad—has similarly been derided by many as political poison. The various ingredients of “Bushism,” it’s been argued, have alienated fiscal hawks and foreign-policy realists, Catholics and libertarians—in short, everyone but the party’s evangelical base.

But someone must have forgotten to tell the GOP presidential field. If you consider how the nation’s most ambitious Republicans are positioning themselves for 2008, Bushism looks like it could have surprising staying power.

Aside from warring against the dreaded earmarks, the McCain/Palin ticket does not propose a radical break with any of the elements of Bushism that Ross describes.  McCain has succumbed to the demands of the movement and the party, but the movement and party have themselves imbibed so much of Bushism that McCain did not have to give up much of anything, except his personal preference for a ticket with Lieberman that would have been entirely obsessed with militarism and war.  In the warped universe of Bush Republicanism, McCain/Palin was the relatively moderate alternative to the extreme Lieberman option.  In truth, by choosing Palin McCain made more of a statement of continuity with the last eight years than if he had chosen any of the other people frequently named as possibilities.  Naturally, given the Bushist habit of abusing language, this is being presented as a clean break and a fresh start.  Rhetorically, McCain and Palin have aligned themselves as the enemies of the status quo, while Obama and Biden are setting themselves up as the steady preservers of establishment interests.  In reality, however, McCain and Palin are reformers every bit as much as the invasion of Iraq was a war of self-defense.

During his completely forgettable acceptance speech, McCain said:

I fight to restore the pride and principles of our party.  We [Republicans] were elected to change Washington, and we let Washington change us.

In other words, it was the same reform mantra that you are hearing today that was used to propel his party into power, whereupon the party mostly failed to do any of the things the voters expected it to do and instead ushered in an era of corruption, government expansion, unnecessary war and subversion of constitutional liberties, so we should give them another chance to do all of it to us again.  I am not sure that we can endure another such era of reform and restoration.