Gerard Baker : McCain speech in full | Brady Bunch on steroids | Ferraro criticises 'sexist' media | Punters fail to take to Palin

After the pyrotechnic display that was Wednesday night’s debut appearance by Sarah Palin, it was always going to be difficult for John McCain to light up the night sky with his acceptance speech to the Republican Convention.

But even by his low oratorical standards this was a less than compelling performance. It seemed in fact, almost as though it might even have been intended as a sort of Anti-Speech, designed to be so unfulfilling that it maximised the contrast with Barack Obama’s spellbinding rhetoric a week ago.

“Look,” it seemed to say, as it laboured from sentence to leaden sentence. “There’s a choice in this election between someone who talks and someone who does. I’m not the former“

Its theme was good enough. It was the return of the old John McCain, the fighter, the maverick, the man who has taken on his own party in congress and worked with Democrats to get things done; the man who has put country first and will do so again to get America back on its feet after a succession of disillusioning setbacks. "Fight with me," he urged Americans, at once reminding them of his own heroism in wartime and the need to work together to solve the nation's problems.

Poor President Bush, the leader of the Republican party for eight years, merited one brief “thank you” at the start, and got precisely as much speech time as his father, the 41st president, and Mrs Barbara Bush. The Republican nominee used the unusual opportunity of a Republican nominating convention to blame Republicans in Washington in the last few years for taking the party and their country off track, saying it was “time for the party of Lincoln, Roosevelt and Reagan to get back to basics”.

This is surely the right approach if Senator McCain is to have any chance at all of winning the election in November. But the manner of delivery and much of the wording itself was so flat and stultified that the message might have been lost on all but the most alert late-night television viewers.

The highlight in fact may have been his one off-the-cuff moment, when he responded cheerfully to a couple of hecklers who had managed to breach the security at the Xcel Center. Keying neatly off the angry shouting into his theme of patriotism and cooperation, he patiently waited for the noise to stop and then said: “Americans want us to stop yelling at one another” .

Senator McCain, probably rightly, steered largely clear of direct negative attacks on his opponent, and in fact began his speech with warm words for Senator Obama. Having left the knifework in the much more deft hands of Governor Palin the night before, he could afford to play by Queensberry’s rules.

But there was no mistaking the implicit message of the Republican candidate’s lengthy disquisitions on his own life’s sacrifices: the contrast between his own, long life of service and his opponent’s short life of career-advancement.

The most sombre part of the speech was Senator McCain’s recounting of his experiences as a prisoner-of-war in Vietnam. He is surely entitled to remind people of this truly heroic moment in his life but there’s a slight danger that he can overdo this. There are few things less edifying than having to listen to someone talk about their own heroism.

The stage-managing of the speech was clumsy too. The candidate wasn’t helped by some curious changes to the background – the screen behind him turned bilious green at one point, horribly reminiscent of one of the senator’s worst campaign speeches earlier in the year.

And the peroration, the one part of the speech that threatened to rise above the dreary ordinariness of it all, was delivered against a steadily rising roar from the crowd and was almost completely lost for posterity.

Still, this was intended as a serious, unflashy, old-fashioned call for the nation to unite around his candidacy and deal with its manifest problems in a spirit of bipartisanship and patriotism.

And though the crowd in the arena dutifully jumped up and down, it was surely not intended to energise and electrify the wider audience beyond. In that, at least, it surely succeeded.

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