A POW Of The GOP

From George Packer:

John McCain became a P.O.W. this week, at the hands of his own Party. It was Sarah Palin’s Convention, not McCain’s. His speech last night was so out of sync with the vituperative tone and stale, hard-right cultural populism of the Convention’s other headliners—above all, Palin—that he sounded less like a Presidential nominee than one of those token speakers given a spot on the program just to prove that the Party welcomes diversity. McCain stood before an arena full of stoked conventioneers, who seemed bored or turned-off as often as they seemed pleased by his remarks, and acquitted himself with the decency and honor that he summoned during the ordeal that defines his life.

This time, though, McCain is collaborating with his captors. By picking Palin he knowingly guided his campaign well over hostile territory and then aimed its nose straight down. Once taken hostage, he refused to speak his captors’ propaganda, but he allowed everyone else to shout it to the rafters. He gambled, all right, but it was in the direction of orthodoxy—for Palin is a creature and an icon of the Republicans’ evangelical base, which came into full possession of the Party this week and completed the G.O.P.’s conversion to identity politics. (See my last post for more on this transformation.) No wonder Pat Buchanan was so fired up on MSNBC, while Mike Huckabee wore the look of a man who missed his train because he was given the wrong departure time.