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'CHANGE IS COMING,' McCAIN PROMISES GOP

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By ADAM NAGOURNEY and MICHAEL COOPER

The New York Times

Published: September 5, 2008

ST. PAUL, Minn. - Sen. John McCain, the former prisoner of war whose bid for the White House appeared in complete collapse just one year ago, accepted the Republican presidential nomination on Thursday with a pledge to move the nation beyond "partisan rancor" and narrow self-interest.

Standing in the center of an arena here, surrounded by thousands of cheering Republican delegates, McCain firmly signaled that he intended to seize the mantle of change Sen. Barack Obama claimed in his own unlikely bid for his party's nomination.

McCain suggested that his choice of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate gave him the license to run as an outsider against Washington, even though McCain has served in Congress for more than 25 years.

"Let me offer an advance warning to the old, big-spending, do-nothing, me-first-country-second Washington crowd: Change is coming," McCain said in remarks prepared for delivery.

With his speech, McCain laid out the broad outlines of his general election campaign. He sought to move from a convention marked by an intense effort to reassure the party base to an appeal to a broader general election electorate that polling suggests has turned sharply on Republicans and President Bush.

To that end, McCain returned to what has been his signature theme as a presidential candidate, including in his unsuccessful 2000 campaign: that he is a politician prepared to defy his own party.

"The constant partisan rancor that stops us from solving these problems isn't a cause, it's a symptom," he said. "It's what happens when people go to Washington to work for themselves and not you.

"Again and again, I've worked with members of both parties to fix problems that need to be fixed. That's how I will govern as president."

McCain defined bipartisanship as not only working with the opposite party but being prepared to work against his own party, even though he is aligned with Bush on two of the biggest issues facing the country: the Iraq war and the economy. That pledge of political independence and bipartisanship could prove especially valuable at a time when the Republican party is so unpopular.

It also permitted him to reprise what has been a central line of attack against Obama, the Democratic nominee, at a convention whose motto is "country first": that his opponent has put his political interests ahead of those of those of the country.

"I will reach out my hand to anyone to help me get this country moving again," McCain said. "I have that record and the scars to prove it. Sen. Obama does not."

He invoked a word, "maverick," that he has sought to associate himself with over the years. "You know, I've been called a maverick, someone who marches to the beat of his own drum," he said. "Sometimes it's meant as a compliment and sometimes it's not. What it really means is I understand who I work for. I don't work for a party. I don't work for a special interest. I don't work for myself. I work for you."

He added: "I'm not in the habit of breaking promises to my country, and neither is Gov. Palin. And when we tell you we're going to change Washington, and stop leaving our country's problems for some unluckier generation to fix, you can count on it."

The campaign not only tried to seize the "change" mantle from Obama but the "peace" one as well. Scores of signs saying "Peace" in capital letters were passed out among the delegates on the floor of the convention, despite the fact that it was Obama who opposed the Iraq war from the start, while McCain was an early proponent of it.

McCain made his opposition to a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq central to his campaign, only to see the Iraqi government and even the Bush administration move closer to Obama's proposal for a phased withdrawal over 16 months. McCain, by contrast, argues that staying in Iraq longer will ensure a more lasting future peace.

McCain's speech closed two weeks of back-to-back conventions in which both candidates disclosed the names of their running-mates and sought to repair fissures in their parties after fiercely contested nominating battles.

The extraordinarily late conventions - delayed, at least in part, because of the Olympics - present the two candidates with an unusually brief eight-week general election campaign. In a sign of just how little time is left, McCain was to leave this city right after his speech and fly to Wisconsin before heading to Colorado. Obama, who kept campaigning through the Republican convention, is making appearances in Pennsylvania and Indiana.

McCain's task was complicated both by the Republicans' poor standing in the polls and his uncertain standing with a big segment of his own party. Before the closing night, the convention was largely focused on addressing the skittishness of the party's conservative base, which has long been wary of McCain. This left his speech, scheduled to last 45 minutes, as McCain's chance to appeal to the independent and Democratic voters who will determine the outcome in this election.

Further, McCain's efforts to present himself as an outsider and someone who has bucked his party could be undermined by his own complicated relationship with both his fellow Republicans and with Bush.

Although he has at times opposed some in his party on issues such as immigration and campaign finance, he has been among the leading supporters of Bush's tax cuts, after initially opposing them, and a staunch supporter of the war in Iraq.

Despite the "Country First" theme of the convention, there was one important character witness who suggested just a few years ago that McCain had not, in fact, always put his country first: McCain himself.

"There have been times when I put my personal ambitions before the public interest," he wrote in "Worth the Fighting For," the 2002 memoir he wrote with his aide, Mark Salter.

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