Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

...I'm younger than that now." What an amazing John McCain ad. Of course, those who hate the messenger and all he stands for will hate the message, but the ad isn't directed at them. It's aimed at all those "moderates" who are moved by notions of courage and conviction and determination and loyalty and all the other intangibles it evokes.

The impressive thing is that the ad says we are rushing away from the present and we can only hope to survive in the future if we understand the past. We need to know where we're coming from, so to speak. McCain's age will be a huge issue in this campaign but he plays to its strength — experience of a treacherous world — by invoking Winston Churchill and Teddy Roosevelt. But where's Ronald Reagan?

Meanwhile, in the New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg, no friend of McCain, has a go at helping the GOP nominee with his vice presidential picks. It's a mischievous and mostly malicious piece, but Hertzberg's Condi Rice proposal is not completely meretricious. "By appointing first Colin Powell and then Rice to the most senior job in the Cabinet, a job of global scope, Bush changed the way millions of white Americans think about black public officials," notes Hertzberg. If a black ever enters the White House, Bush, not Clinton, should get credit for helping open the door.