John McCain had a high hill to climb last night in accepting the Republican presidential nomination: Not only did he have to try to match Democrat Barack Obama's mile-high performance in Denver last week, but also he had to match his own running mate's bare knuckles coming-out speech on Wednesday.

His campaign staff built a fancy runway so McCain could get a running start, but it wasn't long enough for his rhetoric to take flight. No matter; McCain, 72, the senior senator from Arizona, didn't win his party's nomination on his strengths as a speaker, but on the strength of his character and a prickly sense of independence.

Those admirable traits have been on hiatus as McCain tried to rally the GOP's social conservatives to his cause. They were back last night, albeit muted, as McCain scolded some members of his own party for giving into corruption and big spending. "It's time for the party of Lincoln, (Theodore) Roosevelt and Reagan to get back to basics," he said.

It was heartening to hear him say of Obama that "more unites us than divides us" and that "constant partisan rhetoric is not a cause but a symptom. It's what happens when people go to Washington to work for themselves and not for you."

McCain's speech was a sort of love poem to America. "My country saved me and I will not forget it," he said. "And I will fight for her as long as I draw breath, so help me God."

It was not a great speech, but an impassioned one, short on specifics but positive and forward-looking. If the campaign can be as good, America will be well served.

Clearly it will fall to Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the vice presidential nominee, to be the campaign's enforcer. She clearly is ready for the job; her speech Wednesday night made her to 2008 what Obama was in 2004: A young, atypical and powerful political force who arrived out of the blue.

Palin's maiden national effort also called to mind what happened in late October 1964, when a minor Hollywood figure two years away from his first elective office gave a nationally televised speech on behalf of GOP presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. "The Speech," as it came to be known, with its "last best hope of man on earth or final step into a thousand years of darkness" peroration, made Ronald Reagan the hero of American conservatives.

So now comes Palin to claim that title, having energized her party's base around McCain, a man who six months ago many of them could barely abide. She may or may not be the maverick McCain is — or at least used to be — but moose is not the only red meat this Tony Twist of hockey moms can dish out.

She wasn't eloquent, but she was what the party faithful wanted: Dr. Quinn, Governor Woman, the warm, gracious, multi-tasking wife-mom-politician. Then she electrified her audience in St. Paul, Minn., blasting the media, mocking community organizers, praising oil drillers, disparaging Obama as "a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform," casting McCain and herself as true change agents, not "members in good standing of the Washington elite." She assumed for herself the mantle of Harry Truman, no doubt accounting for that spinning sound emanating from a certain Missouri Democrat's grave in Independence.

The true test of rhetoric is not whether it can move the true believers, but whether it can move the voters. In the next two months, McCain and Palin will face tougher crowds than the one they faced in St. Paul. Some of their positions — Mr. McCain's "outsider" status and Palin's hostility toward science to name but two — won't stand much scrutiny, and there is reason to wonder how united the Republicans truly are.

But McCain set the right tone Thursday night.

REPRINTED FROM THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH.

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