After accepting the Republican Party’s nomination for president “with gratitude, humility, and confidence,” Sen. John McCain played up the importance of selflessness, experience, and his war story in Vietnam in an attempt to cement himself as the ultimate patriotic Presidential pick.
“I’ve been called a maverick—someone who marches to the beat of his own drum,” said the 72-year-old four-term Senator. “What it really means is I understand what I work for. I don’t work for a party, I don’t work for a special interest, I don’t work for myself, I work for you.”
Borrowing from his opponent Barack Obama’s message of change, McCain emphatically announced to a raucous crowd at Xcel Center in St. Paul, “Let me offer an advance warning to the old, big spending, do nothing, me first, country second Washington crowd: Change is coming.”
Big Mac
After briefly acknowledging how much of an inspiration his wife Cindy was to him and his VP pick Sarah Palin’s speech that revitalized the GOP base on Wednesday, McCain spent most of the rest of his speech addressing issue by issue, touching on bipartisanship, government bureaucracy, education, and foreign affairs.
McCain took the time to lend credence to his counterpart, Democratic nominee for Barack Obama, by acknowledging, “We are both Americans: an association that means more to me than anything else.”Instead of “rejecting good ideas because we didn't think of them first, let’s use the best of ideas of both sides,” McCain urged.
The self-claimed “maverick” who prided himself on being strongly anti-corruption noted that Republicans “lost the trust of the American people when some [of us] gave in to the temptations of corruption…and when we valued our power over our principles.”
“We're going to change that,” McCain asserted to boisterous applause.
He even threatened that if elected President, the first pork-barrel spending bill he saw on his desk, he would veto and would publicly ostracize the sponsors.
“I will make them famous and you will know their names,” McCain said.
While simultaneously promoting his “small government” and “no bureaucracy” beliefs on taxes, health care, and spending, he attacked Obama’s policies, which he said would raise taxes, cut jobs, and bloat government bureaucracy.
McCain, who isn’t known for talking on the issue of education much, surprised many when he claimed that “education is the civil rights issue of this century.”
He proposed to “shake up failed school bureaucracy with competition, empower parents with choice… and [help] bad teachers find another line of work.”
“Sen. Obama wants our schools to answer to unions and bureaucrats,” said McCain, but “I want schools to answer to students.”
On the more familiar issue of foreign policy, McCain hit the ground running, speaking on the threat that Al Qaeda and Iran, before settling on the Russia-Georgia conflict which has made news headlines worldwide.
“I'll work to establish good relations with Russia so that we need not fear a return to the Cold War,” McCain said, adding that he is “prepared” to face threats with "confidence, wisdom, and resolve."
While, according to recent polls, McCain trumps Obama in being the candidate Americans think will be better suited to handle foreign policy issues, Obama leads—by far—on the economy.
McCain challenged that notion, but only shortly, repeating his stances on limited government, and then transitioning into energy policy because, according to him, the broken economy was due to “damage done by rising oil prices.”
Raucous Crowds, Rousing Speakers
Earlier in the day—the last day of the Republican National Convention, McCain was praised in separate speeches by two former potential running mates. Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty and former Pennsylvania Governor and ex-Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge electrified a crowd already energized from Palin’s speech the night before.
“Barack Obama gives a good speech, but the best sermons aren't preached, they're lived,” Pawlenty blasted. “John McCain's whole life is a testimony to service, duty, courage and common sense. John McCain has walked the walk, and he has always put our country first.”
Tom Ridge, like Pawlenty, couldn’t help but also exalt the 72-year-old four-term Senator.
Ridge described McCain as “an artful leader, a diplomat, a tenacious legislator…a consensus builder, a reformer—the patriot who always puts his country first…a Reagan conservative, an optimist, America’s go-to guy.”
“That’s John McCain!” Ridge declared to the crowd.
But McCain was also met with disdain, as only a few minutes after he had stepped onstage to a “townhall” setting for his acceptance speech, a protester from CODEPINK, a group of anti-war women activists, interrupted McCain’s speech by attempting to rush the stage.After the pink-dress-wearing demonstrator was apprehended and escorted away, McCain quipped, “Please don’t be diverted by the ground noise and the static” to loud cheers and chants of “U-S-A!” to drown out the protester
That seemingly didn’t affect McCain, as he ended his address with a forceful call to his supporters to put “country first.”
“Fight with me! Stand up to defend our country! Stand up! Stand up and fight! We’re Americans, and we never give up, we never quit, we never hide from history, we make history,” he said emphatically to the gathering of Republicans that was on its feet.
