And that's a problem for John McCain. A great candidate for hustling neocons and owners of five or more homes, he is dead wrong about Iraq, dead wrong about the economy, and he was born 20 years too soon. But Republicans feel sorry for how he was savaged eight years ago, and so they will prop the old man up, retrain him as best they can, keep him on message, stuff a rag in him when he starts kidding around.
People have lots of questions about Barack Obama, and that's as it should be. The man inspires curiosity. The problem for Mr. McCain is that Mr. Obama explains himself so well. Those people jamming basketball arenas aren't going there to look at his shoes. If you listen to the man speak, you're likely to vote for him. If you listen to Mr. McCain, you're reminded of your great-uncle Elmer hashing over the injustice of MacArthur getting canned by Harry Truman. Who cares?
And then there is the Current Occupant. He's kept quiet for a while, cutting brush, playing speed golf, treadmilling, but he's bound to emerge in the fall, make a speech, issue a statement, do something, and this will not be good for Mr. McCain.
America has paid a terrible price for one family's decision to take a boy out of the public schools of Midland, Texas, and send him off to Chutney or Amway or whatever his prep school was called, and then to Yale, where he picked up a permanent grudge against people who were smarter than he is. A Yalie who learned to pass for redneck, a Methodist who learned to pass for evangelical, he was cut out for politics, but what a lousy administrator and what a dull, uninspiring leader. Fewer people want more Bushiness than want to see the return of infantile paralysis. And the truth is marching on.
Garrison Keillor's column appears regularly in The Sun. His e-mail is oldscout@prairiehome.us.
