THE McCAIN MOMENT

Posted at 6:39 a.m. ET

Peggy Noonan gives a sharp assessment, I think, of why McCain has suddenly started to move up.  The key, of course, is to keep the movement going.

Why is it a real race now, with John McCain rising in the polls and Barack Obama falling? There are many answers, but here I think is an essential one: The American people have begun paying attention.

They look at Obama:

This is what they see:

An attractive, intelligent man, interesting, but—he's hard to categorize. Is he Gen. Obama? No, no military background. Brilliant Businessman Obama? No, he never worked in business. Famous Name Obama? No, it's a new name, an unusual one. Longtime Southern Governor Obama? No. He's a community organizer (what's that?), then a lawyer (boo), then a state legislator (so what, so's my cousin), then U.S. senator (less than four years!).

There is no pre-existing category for him.

Add to that the wear and tear of Jeremiah Wright, secret Muslim rumors, media darling and, this week, abortion.

She argues that the Rick Warren debate mattered because it came just as Americans began to focus on the race.

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 wouldn't vote to ban partial-birth abortions because we must contemplate a rigorous legal parsing of any and all possible implications regarding emanations and of the viability of Roe v. Wade?

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

...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.

Noonan gives some surprising advice on which speech to look for:

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...

...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.

I'd forgotten about that, and Peggy Noonan is right.  It was a great moment, and enjoyed by the people at home.

Noonan believes McCain should make a one-term pledge.  I do not.  It would simply call attention to his age, and who knows what a practiced, invigorated McCain would be like in four years?  Maybe he'd be at the top.

This was supposed to be the Obama moment.  If McCain plays it right, he can make it his moment.  If he plays it right, and if the press lets him.

August 22, 2008.