John McCain and Sarah Palin took the stage in Virginia Beach this morning to the theme song from the movie Rocky, a 1977 Billboard #1 hit called “Gonna Fly Now.” The song’s opening stanza seems especially apt for McCain’s current situation: “Trying hard now/ It’s so hard now/ Trying hard now”–sung in a funky disco groove.
Absent from the speeches that followed was any hammering on last week’s theme, Who is Barack Obama?, with references to William Ayers, abortion votes or big city Chicago corruption. At one point Sarah Palin seemed to nod at the seething “anger” that seemed to overtake the message last week. “Ladies and gentleman, let John McCain turn that anger into action,” she called out, in her folksy way, apparently aiming to get everyone back on track.
McCain’s new-and-improved stump speech is a much more standard experience-‘n-mettle argument: “What America needs now is a fighter; someone who puts all his cards on the table and trusts he judgement of the American people.” The speech was distinguished by merging together two different fights–the struggling economy and the struggling McCain campaign–into a single problem with a sole solution, someone with the life experience of McCain. “I know what fear feels like,” McCain said, returning to the language of his convention speech. “It’s a thief in the night who robs your strength. I know what hopelessness feels like. It’s an enemy who defeats your will. I felt those things once before. I will never let them in again. I’m an American and I choose to fight.”
As for the state of the campaign, McCain still chooses to see the glass 43 percent full. He garbled the delivery a bit, but here is how his prepared remarks read:
Let me give you the state of the race today. We have 22 days to go. We’re 6 points down. The national media has written us off. Senator Obama is measuring the drapes, and planning with Speaker Pelosi and Senator Reid to raise taxes, increase spending, take away your right to vote by secret ballot in labor elections, and concede defeat in Iraq. But they forgot to let you decide. My friends, we’ve got them just where we want them.
Or as the lady sings in the Rocky theme song, “Getting strong now/ Won’t be long now /Getting strong now.” Of course, Rocky was a work of fiction. But then McCain has always been heavily invested in fictional mythology. As the New York Times recounts this morning, McCain often turned to characters from fiction and film:
[H]is memoir incorporated some of the defiance of Marlon Brando’s outlaws, the self-discovery of W. Somerset Maugham’s ‘Of Human Bondage’; and the stoicism of Ernest Hemingway’s dying hero in ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls.’ (“You know he is a fictional character?” Mr. Salter said he once asked Mr. McCain, who replied, “I know, but he was influential!”)