Noun, Verb, P.O.W.

John McCain talked about his personal story tonight in his acceptance speech on the last night of the Republican convention. He did so because there's nothing else he can talk about.

He heads a discredited party whose president couldn't even show his face at his own party's convention because it would turn off swing voters who distrust him when they don't despise him. He'd rather talk about being tortured himself in the 60s than admit the fact that the leaders of his own party have condoned torture of people who are being held in secret places without being charged with any crime. He'd rather allow his running mate to attack Barack Obama in carefully chosen code words (whenever either she or Rudy Giuliani used the words "community organizer" it sounded like those scenes in films like "Grand Illusion" or "Mean Streets" where we can tell that a character is anti-Semitic just by the way they pronounce a Jewish name) than to accept the fact that a party whose convention delegates are 93% white can no longer be said to represent America.

John McCain and the Republicans are the past. Barack Obama and the Democrats are the future.

Can John McCain run on the record of the past eight years? Of course not -- which is why he ran away from it as fast as he could. Are we better off than we were when Bill Clinton left office? Of course not -- which is why George W. Bush couldn't show his face at his own party's convention.

That's why you heard about John McCain's story ad nauseam during this convention. That's why we heard over and over again about how he was shot down and how he was tortured (but not about how he signed a confession) and how he came home with injuries that he carries to this day.

To paraphrase Winston Churchill, wars are not won by P.O.W.s. And while McCain's service is impressive, and his courage is laudatory, it has no bearing whatsoever on the choice Americans have to make in November. After all, you never heard Franklin Roosevelt say, "Vote for me -- I have polio!" He told a country in the worst crisis it had faced in 68 years that he had a new deal for the American people. He spoke about optimism in the face of misery -- and he won in a landslide. John McCain, and his party, act as if it's 1980 and all it takes is a promise to cut taxes on the rich and boost military spending to get elected.

He, and they, are going to find out differently in about two months.