I don't have a lot of deep reflections at this point. Frankly, I feel emotionally exhausted and I don't know if thats the emotion of the campaign or just that I'm physically tired today and its affecting my writing mood.
I watched and listened to McCain's speech. I believe he has a sincere desire to serve. I'm angered that he is running mostly on his biography and far less than I would prefer on the issues. His pitch boils down to trust me, because I really do believe in service and a cause greater, and he does have some elements of his life and bio that lend credence to his argument. I voted for Bush twice. I was uninspired by Gore's ideas. Kerry didn't seem to bring enough firepower to the table to justify switching horses in the middle of a war. When the Bush administration came to power, it was said that it was going to be government by grownups. It has not played out that way.
The McCain bio is compelling, and there is a sincerity to the man, but while he tried to distance himself from Bush, mentioning him only once, and to chastise his party and set himself as a man apart from it, he is still a republican. He picked Palin in order to bring in the republican base. And I am not comfortable with the face of the party base on display in St. Paul. A convention and party that was overwhelmingly white and lacking in diversity and which embraced with rabid fervor the return of the culture war from Palin. I find it hard to trust that my black family, my black community will be well served or find responsiveness there.
He's running on bio. He's clear about the place in the world he wants for America, but he is not speaking with clarity about how he will implement the values he espouses. Lowering taxes, cutting spending is fine, but your methodology is important too and he's hiding the ball there. He is talking about reform, but he doesn't tell me enough about how he intends to implement that reform. Sans the details, I am not yet convinced that he is really going to be a different republican, a better republican. He is making the case with some success that he is not a third Bush term, but I can't say I've heard a definitive break from Bush, particularly since he is talking in such broad republican themes.
So those are just a few of my thoughts following the speech. I'm tired and worn out. I fear the world McCain might create, the break he might not make from his party. The republicans have the right ideas and principles, but get it wrong in the application and as a black person, its really hard to say that they are looking out for or give a damn about my community. As hard as they try, I am never quite sure that they are not evil. They do wrong when they should know better, and McCain even alluded to that tonigh. Democrats and Obama have some wrong principles and just inept ideas about how to fix things. They are misguided bunglers on some fronts and prone to get things wrong because they proceed to solutions from wrong principles. I never find them to be evil, more often just misguided, but with evil results.
Exit comment: I watched Tavis interview Mel Martinez and some other republican after the speech and I found myself irritated at the non agrressive questioning of those guys about their non diverse convention. This is the guy who always has got some snarky feedback about Obama, but he couldn't muster up some hard questions about how lacking in diversity the convention was and by extension, the party.
