The campaign begins to matter

Peggy Noonan:

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The Rick Warren debate mattered. Why? It took place at exactly the moment America was starting to pay attention. This is what it looked like by the end of the night: Mr. McCain, normal. Mr. Obama, not normal. You've seen this discussed elsewhere. Mr. McCain was direct and clear, Mr. Obama both more careful and more scattered. But on abortion in particular, Mr. McCain seemed old-time conservative, which is something we all understand, whether we like such a stance or not, and Mr. Obama seemed either radical or dodgy. He is "in … favor of limits" on late-term abortions, though some would consider those limits "inadequate." (In the past week much legal parsing on emanations of penumbras as to the viability of Roe v. Wade followed.)

As I watched I thought: How about "Let the baby live"? Don't parse it. Just "Let the baby live."

As to the question when human life begins, the answer to which is above Mr. Obama's pay grade, oh, let's go on a little tear. You know why they call it birth control? Because it's meant to stop a birth from happening nine months later. We know when life begins. Everyone who ever bought a pack of condoms knows when life begins.

To put it another way, with conception something begins. What do you think it is? A car? A 1948 Buick?

If you want to argue whether legal abortion is morally defensible, have at it and go to it, but Mr. Obama's answers here seemed to me strange and disturbing.

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I suspect everyone has the convention speeches wrong. Everyone expects Mr. Obama to rouse, but the speech I'd watch is Mr. McCain's.

He's the one with the real opportunity, because no one expects anything. He's never been especially good at making speeches. (The number of men who've made it to the top of the GOP who don't particularly like making speeches, both Bushes and Mr. McCain, is astonishing, and at odds with the presumed requirements of the media age. The first Bush saw speeches as show biz, part of the weary requirement of leadership, and the second's approach reflects a sense that words, though interesting, were not his friend.)

But Mr. McCain provided, in 2004, one of the most exciting and certainly the most charged moment of the Republican Convention, when he looked up at Michael Moore in the press stands and said, "Our choice wasn't between a benign status quo and the bloodshed of war, it was between war and a greater threat. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. . . . And certainly not a disingenuous filmmaker who would have us believe that Saddam's Iraq was an oasis of peace." It blew the roof off. And the smile he gave Mr. Moore was one of pure, delighted malice. When Mr. McCain comes to play, he comes to play.

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Words are part of Noonan's craft which is why she was a great speech writer and recognizes when others do it well. What McCain brings to the campaign is the the political warriors mentality. I loved the fact that he took on Moore at the convention and that he is taking on Obama and the Democrats on the war now.

They have been disarmed by the Bush administrations nearly unilateral political disarmament when it comes to defending its policy in Iraq and the war in general. That will not happen with the McCain campaign and Obama is already suffering from the attacks on his judgment about the war in Iraq.

He and the Democrats have presumed they owned the issue and no one would dare challenge them. They were wrong about Iraq when they voted 60 times last year for retreat and McCain is not going to let the voters forget it.

They and many of the pollsters misread the dissatisfaction surveys and presumed that all those who said they were unhappy with the war did not want to win. But many were unhappy precisely because they wanted to win and did not think we were doing enough to assure the victory. They were not all MoveOn voters and they are coming back to the GOP now that we are winning.

The Democrats are out of touch on energy and taxes and McCain is hammering on those issues too.