The first time I saw McCain in person was at the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. It was, historically, a forgettable affair. Everyone knew that Barack Obama would win the election, and the contrast in hype between the RNC and the DNC in Denver couldn’t have been more comical. In Denver, aside from the thousands and thousands of additional people, there was a roughly one-mile security perimeter outside the arena in which the convention was held. In St. Paul, I remember just waltzing into the front door of the building. The first day of the convention had been canceled—there was another hurricane, and Republicans were still anxious, post–Hurricane Katrina, about the optics of living their lives amid a national disaster. The incumbent president, George W. Bush, was so unpopular that he only briefly spoke to the convention via recorded video. Only on the penultimate night, when Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin introduced herself to the nation with the sort of tainted red meat that would become the new flavor of the Republican base, was there finally a pulse in the arena. McCain’s speech the following night was supposed to be an afterthought.
The funny thing about it all? McCain’s keynote, delivered indoors to a base that still didn’t particularly trust him, and one week after Obama had given his speech at a columned stage in a football stadium twice the arena’s size, was the better speech, by far. McCain’s history as a prisoner of war during Vietnam was not a new story to anyone. And yet I’m not sure he had ever put it more beautifully than in the speech’s closing passage.
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