McCAIN's HEROIC STORY

The contrast between the multiple-autobiography-elaborating self-aggrandizing story of Barack Hussein Obama, on the one hand, and the heart-rending, largely private, self-effacing story of a real hero, John S. McCain, is becoming sharper every day.

Even today, the stirring story of McCain's deeds is unknown to many otherwise knowledgeable and well-informed people.

Who knows more about politics and history than Michael Barone?

Yet in his brilliant column at US News, Barone admits that McCain's story was not completely known to him.

Fred Thompson warmed up the crowd with a dramatic narration of the imprisonment and torture of John McCain (I learned things I did not know and was moved).

And when he learned them, he was moved.

I am sure that every American watching the speech -- and there were more than 40 million of us -- was moved by Senator McCain's quiet and forthright statement that the North Vietnamese had broken him.

The McCain-Palin campaign needs to break through the wall of the media, and get that story out. Over the next 60 days, I think they will.

For your reading pleasure, here's Barone on Governor Palin:

When I asked campaign manager Rick Davis on the floor Thursday night about how McCain had spotted Palin's talents—a more friendly version of the questions Schmidt was sick of answering—he said they had looked at lots of things, including the YouTube.com videos of her speeches and debates that I watched till too-late hours on Monday and Tuesday nights.

She is clearly a political natural, a rare talent, a hitherto unknown orator who sprang into the national consciousness as suddenly as William Jennings Bryan (then a 36-year-old former Congressman from Nebraska) did at the Democratic convention in 1896. (I wasn't covering that convention but am told my grandmother Darcy heard Bryan speak in Detroit.)

The Palin choice was a gamble, but not a thoughtless one: Just as a skilled card-counter can beat the odds in blackjack, one who is skilled in evaluating political talent can beat the odds in selecting a veep. Note that Palin's speech featured brilliant skewering of Barack Obama and made no (or virtually no) mention of George W. Bush.

It was the speech of an out-party nominee, one from a place as far from the nation's capital as it is possible to be and still be in the United States. And with that grand Pacific Northwest/Alaska variant on the Midwestern accent that is, or should be recognized as, standard English.

Now, hie thee hence and read the whole thing!