McCain’s speech demonstrated the ways in which the GOP is finally losing its ideological coherence.  At the end of the long Reagan era, the party cannot either sustain its conservative base nor abandon it for a broader coalition.  McCain’s desire to split the difference shows that Democrats have an historic chance to press a progressive agenda.

On another note, Sarah Palin - a kind of George Wallace in drag - brings to mind a great essay by the psychoanalytic theorist Joan Riviere, Womanliness as Masquerade.