The McCain bus keeps on going! Where Barack Obama and his team made headline after headline the past few weeks, John McCain has succeeded like no other in putting himself back in to the spotlight. With exposing his secret weapon Sarah Palin to the world Obama was put in the media shadows for the first time in a long while. Now, with Palin, the Republican Convention and McCain’s long awaited speech the spotlight is turned back in to the Republican corner, shining brighter on McCain than it probably has ever done before. Mission accomplished his pr-team must think.

With Sarah Palin, her husband and Cindy McCain walking on stage, joining McCain in a rain of red, white and blue balloons, the epiphany of patriotism, the ending of the Republican convention was as much of a show as the entire circus that has been surrounding the McCain camp for the last week. Only, the lights, the balloons, the music and all the other things are still not enough to cover the flaws, the blanks and the downright mistakes that have been made by the McCain team and McCain himself.

Having read an article in Times Magazine by Joe Klein, he seems to be on the same page as me. Talking about McCain’s acceptance speech he says that it was the first time he heard a presidential candidate admit his own party’s failure. But then again, after eight years of Bush, scandals and disappointments McCain has no other choice than promising a different Republican party. In his speech he also talked about the things that he would change, only there was little that indicated how he was planning on implementing these changes. Even more, as Klein says, “the Republican Party is what it is: an overwhelmingly Caucasian group of people — 93% of the delegates were white — who cheer more vociferously for tax cuts than they do for country."

As became clear out of McCain’s speech, he and his team are apparently not that well informed when it comes to Obama’s positions on several important issues. Klein says about this:

“It was notable only for the steady stream of misrepresentations of Barack Obama's positions: Obama would ‘raise taxes,’ but McCain's own economic advisor Douglas Holtz-Eakin said last month, that Obama's plan was a net tax cut for most Americans. Obama's health plan was a ‘government run health care system,’ which it isn't. It isn't even mandatory. And McCain's plan would actually increase taxes for some by limiting the deductibility of employer-provided health benefits. He said Obama opposed offshore drilling and nuclear power, after an audience of 40 million saw Obama say last week that he was open to both. But he failed to disarm Obama's most potent criticism: that he essentially favors the same policies — especially the economic policies — as George W. Bush. And it wasn't corruption that caused those policies to fail; it was the radical orthodoxy of the vision. ''

I couldn’t agree more. Almost all the speeches that where held during the Republican Convention, if it was Palin’s or Romney’s or Lieberman’s, were centered around all that is wrong with Obama and the plans he has to change America. With their ‘Country First’ slogan they however seem to forget that if they would be putting the country first, they would not only admit that things have to change; they would also come up with a good and solid plan of action on how they are going to achieve these changes.

And this is where the lights go out and the music dies: there is no plan, there will be no change. Not from the Republican side at least. When the circus leaves town only the mess stays behind and it’s up to the citizens once again to clean it up and deal with it.

SOURCE: http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1838965,00.html