Tag Archives: john-mccain

The day the Republican Party took one of its sharper turns away from conservatism I didn’t notice it at first. It was August 29, 2008. I was with my parents in Bethany Beach, Delaware. It was a hot, sunny day— another scorcher — and before we walked up to the …

Maybe this is all Aaron Sorkin’s fault. The Big Speech has always been a powerful tool in politics, and no format is more consistently attention-getting than the public emperor-has-no-clothes soliloquy. Speechifying probably peaked in American politics in the second half of the 19th century, when (aided by the lack of …