In the Name of Their Fathers

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Bush provided fresh contrasts to McCain last week. While McCain blasted fellow Republican Pat Buchanan for arguing that America did not have to take on Hitler, Bush appeased him, explaining that "I need all the votes" he could get. While McCain says he is running "because I owe America more than she has ever owed me," Bush sometimes seems motivated by a need to redeem his father's defeat. He keeps bringing it up in a way that suggests it has been his life's deepest wound. Last Wednesday he said that Buchanan's 1992 candidacy had had a role in derailing his father, and suggested that Ross Perot carried a "vendetta" against his family. In McCain's story his father comes across as a source of humility and as inspiration for public service. Bush, on the other hand, seems to have inherited his sense of entitlement from his father, and after the President's defeat, an ongoing personal cause.

A week ago Saturday, the Governor could be found with Dad at the Ryder Cup golf tournament, having skipped the tedium of the California Republican Party's convention. To spur the American team on to its jingoistic, fist-pumping victory, Bush gave a pep talk in which he compared the brave golfers fighting to win a noisome corporate-infested sporting event to the brave men who fought to save the Alamo--the use of the profound in service of the mundane.

McCain is no saint (he will tick off the reasons he isn't, if you don't beg him to stop), but he is the natural, solid alternative should there be second thoughts about Bush's pre-emptive coronation. Many people at the rally in Nashua clutched McCain's book and approached him for his signature with something like reverence. One man carefully removed his copy from a Ziploc bag to get the Senator's autograph, then carefully tucked it back in the bag. He didn't want any smudges or dog-eared pages. It's not a coffee-table book, but that's where he planned to display it.