No we McCain't

It's cheap to hire a no-hit-wonder of a band for an official campaign event, but it was even cheaper that in the 40 minutes preceding McCain's teleprompted speech, the band mostly played old recordings. Cheapest of all was that the band exercised poor, McCain-like judgment in choosing songs like Tina Turner's "Simply the Best" and "Highway to the Danger Zone", the latter of which reminded me of the movie Top Gun and made me think of the short, spoiled brat of a Navy pilot who played the main character.

My mind wandered to other songs I might hear. Perhaps Whitney Houston's "I Have Nothing", and as we walked about, I began singing the diva's tune:

Take me for what I am, cuz I'll never chaaange, all my coloooors for youuu … I'll never ask for too much - just all that you are, and everything you dooooo … I won't hold it back again, this passion inside, can't run from myself, there's nowhere to hiiiiiiide … Stay in my aaaarms - if you dare … I have nothing, nothing, NOTHING! if I don't … have … youuuuu-ouuuuuuuu.

I was having a ball with the Houston cover when Anita interrupted. "They look so bored," she said. An old vet had fallen asleep on a railing near the band. Behind the stage, two dozen women sitting in the only partially filled "Country First" bleacher section were filing their nails. The rest were either on their cell phones or staring open-mouthed at the clouds.

The crowd - pasty white, mostly retired and about as culturally diverse as a KKK cross-burning ceremony in post-Civil War Tennessee - was more flaccid than an entire monastery of castrated monks.

We watched with much amusement as the man we deemed the official "campaign fluffer" ran wildly throughout the fairgrounds waving a "McCain-Palin" poster and screaming like a madman to chant, clap, sing, dance and hoist their children onto their shoulders.
This did not rouse the old vet asleep at the gate, but we did see a man wearing a "Liberalism Spawns Terrorism" cut-off tee hoist his son onto his shoulders after the fluffer passed by.

When McCain finally came out, wobbling down the fenced-off runway like he was walking on a wooden leg, he shook hands with the group of fans sporting "Plumbers for McCain" T-shirts, made stiff-armed waves at photographers and scrunched his already-wrinkled face into a Nixon-esque smile for the crowd.

The three-foot tall platform elevated the shrimp of a man to near eye level, and because the crowd lining the fence maxed out at two people deep, Anita and I were able to snap a few up-close photos.

Once he found the stage, the flaccid applause had fallen three points to the decibel level of an Egyptian tomb, and the senior citizen we'd all been waiting for finally began his speech with his signature opening (and middle, and end): "My friends …"

He grilled Obama for his socialistic policies to cut taxes for 95 per cent of Americans and return tax rates for the rich to Clinton-era levels. He touted his apparently unsocialistic plan to spend US$3 billion of taxpayer dollars buying up all the "bad" mortgages that stupid Americans couldn't pay off. And when he noted the liberal elite media pundits (and, in reality, the staunchly conservative ones too) who have written off his chances of producing even a respectable defeat come November 4, McCain gave his second favourite line, "We've got 'em right where we want 'em."

As expected, McCain delivered the same speech we'd read every day in the Associated Press reports from every major and minor city, town and village from California to Connecticut since August.

The Dustbowl State senator spewed rhetoric calling for less rhetoric, desperately claimed that "We love bein' the underdog," and issued the ill-fated "Senator Obama is measuring the drapes" line, which George H.W. used before losing to Bill Clinton in 1992 and George W. used before Democrats took majority control of Congress in 2006.