Let It Rain.(The Talk of the Town)(political campaigns)

A couple of weeks before August 28th--the night that Barack Obama accepted the Democratic nomination for President, in a Denver football stadium--Stuart Shepard, the digital-media director of the lobbying arm of Focus on the Family, one of the most powerful organizations on the religious right, posed a question to his Internet viewers. "Would it be wrong," he asked, "to pray for rain?" Shepard's answer, apparently, was no, because he proceeded to do just that. He prayed for there to be rain--abundant rain, torrential rain, "rain of Biblical proportions"--in Denver on August 28th. "I'm praying for unexpected, unanticipated, unforecasted rain that starts two minutes before the speech is set to begin," he said, adding, "I know there will probably be people who will pray for seventy-two degrees and clear skies, but this isn't a contest."

In the event, Obama gave his speech under clear skies with the thermometer at seventy-two degrees. It's hard to draw definitive conclusions from this about the efficacy of prayer. Still, Shepard and others who assume that the Almighty faxes meteorological talking points as a matter of routine must now be puzzling over what He meant last week by arranging for a hurricane just severe enough to disrupt the opening of the Republican National Convention (and freshen the public's memories of the present Administration's Katrina incompetence) but, mercifully, not so severe as to do too much damage to the innocent.

The Focus on the Family approach to divine intervention having fizzled, John McCain needed a deus ex machina. The deus--or rather, in this case, the dea--he found, sprung fully formed from the brow of Rush Limbaugh, is the governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin. The machina is "the base," the Christianist conservatives who have come to dominate the Republican Party. Governor Palin ticks every box on the checklist of the social right. She opposes abortion rights, even for women and girls made pregnant by rape or incest. She thinks that creationism should be taught alongside evolution in public schools. She does not believe that global warming is caused by human activity. She supports public funding for homeschooling. She is against stem-cell research. She opposes "explicit" sex education and supports the abstinence-only kind, though she is surely aware of its indifferent record of success.

With the selection of Sarah Palin, McCain completes the job of defusing the enmity (and forgoing the honor) he earned in 2000, when he condemned Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as "agents of intolerance." His motives in choosing her were entirely tactical and mostly--the mot juste is that of Mike Murphy, once McCain's top political aide, overheard by an errant microphone--cynical. Besides placating the right, those motives included the short-term goal of preempting the weekend news cycles that might otherwise have been devoted to reviewing Obama's triumphant Democratic Convention. The price that McCain paid, and that could sooner or later be exacted from the nation, was the abandonment of what he had repeatedly called his overriding requirement for a Vice-President: someone who would be ready to take his place at a moment's notice--"you know, immediately."

According to Time, Palin's acceptance address was drafted--by a former Bush White House speechwriter--before she was chosen and then retailored to fit her. Like almost every major speech at that Convention (Mike Huckabee's being an exception), it substituted sarcasm for humor in its sneers at Obama. "I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, ...