John McCain has a way of rising to occasions like tonight’s speech. He’s no great orator, and there’s no way he will be able to match Palin’s skills, but he can move a crowd with quiet force. He can strike at the weakness of Obama’s claim to the mantle of reformer and change agent with the example of his own career, though he probably can’t (and shouldn’t) employ biting humor in quite the way Giuliani and Palin did last night. It would be very nice, though, if he also mentioned the fact that he is running on some particular policy proposals and ideas—that reform actually means something specific, that he has a very good and developed health care proposal, for instance, which you certainly wouldn’t guess from this convention so far, or that he wants to offer tax relief to middle class parents (it wouldn’t hurt to expand that proposal a bit here too, it’s not too late). The convention has given McCain an extremely good launching pad to make some particular substantive appeals in his speech. They shouldn’t dominate the speech, of course, but they really ought to be part of it.