McCain gets personal, comes to life

Only when John McCain spoke of POW experience did his speech rise above ordinary, say pundits

At risk of being overshadowed by his vice presidential pick, and needing to distance himself from he Bush/Cheney legacy, John McCain sought to rise above the fray and portray himself as a reformer. Did he succeed? The pundits and speechwriters weigh in:

Gerard Baker, Times of London: “Even by [McCain’s] low oratorical standards this was a less than compelling performance,” said Baker, The Times’ U.S. editor. “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 maximized the contrast with Barack Obama’s spellbinding rhetoric a week ago … 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.”