Comparing Mitt Romney's RNC speech to what the last Republican president with a successful foreign-policy record said

My colleague James Bennet, The Atlantic's editor, points to the speech above, George H.W. Bush's acceptance speech at the 1988 RNC, as one of the most successful convention speeches of the modern era. I watched it on television, but I was also only eight years old at the time, so I returned to it last night, and it only deepened my nostalgia for a bygone Republican Party. I prefer the elder Bush to his son, to Bob Dole, to John McCain, and to Mitt Romney.

I prefer him to Barack Obama too.

One reason among several is the way that he talked about war. His words reflected the hard won wisdom of World War II veterans much more than the bellicose rhetoric of today's Republican hawks, many of whom never served and know war only as an abstract intellectual exercise. It is no surprise that they see war as ennobling, and urge more of it. The elder Bush was different.

He spoke about liberals and American exceptionalism in ways that would fit in Republican speeches today (that is to say, he marshaled nationalist rhetoric):

My opponent's view of the world sees a long slow decline for our country, an inevitable fall, mandated by impersonal, historical forces. But America is not in decline. America is a rising nation. He sees America as another pleasant country on the U.N. roll call, somewhere between Albania and Zimbabwe. And I see America as the leader, a unique nation with a special role in the world. This has been called the American century because in it we were the dominant force for good in the world. We saved Europe. Cured polio. Went to the moon. And lit the world with our culture. And now we're on the verge of a new century. And what country's name will it bear? I say it will be another American century. Our work is not done, our force is not spent.



This is where John McCain or Condoleezza Rice would launch into a defense of interventionism abroad, and suggest that the American military should be lengthening its occupations, intervening in countries where boots aren't currently on the ground, and advancing our values through the force of arms.