Sarah Vowell: Party Guy. One of the maddening things about presidential campaigns is the near certain knowledge that you'll never fully anticipate what you'll get once a candidate is elected. Moreover, the risks of those bets keep increasing, as the executive branch concentrates more and more power, especially the power to bull into insane, hapless wars. As Vowell points out, this is nothing new.

Former Senator Fred Thompson, in his folksy and entertaining speech at the Republican National Convention on Tuesday night, described his party's presidential nominee as such a rule-breaking scamp that for a minute there I thought he was nominating Tom Sawyer for president instead of John McCain. When Mr. Thompson described Senator McCain's progression from Naval Academy cut-up to war hero, all I could think about was a ne'er-do-well West Point cadet bound for military distinction, Ulysses S. Grant.

In the 1868 presidential election, when the American people voted for Grant, the greatest war hero of the 19th century, they had no inkling they had just chosen one of our worst presidents, a largely clueless chief executive who allowed corruption to flourish in his administration and who offered pretty much zero leadership during the depression known as the Panic of 1873.

Another example:

Senator McCain has been both lauded and derided as a "gambler" for choosing the obscure governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, as his running mate. That's nothing compared to the sucker bet the American people are forced to make every four years. For instance, who knew that Herbert Hoover, who had been such a heroic do-gooder for the Belgians during their food crisis of 1914, would turn out to be a president blatantly blasé about Americans who were starving during the Great Depression?

Then there was George W. Bush, the guy who wanted America to assume a more modest foreign policy:

One of my biggest fears about the current president back in January 2001 was that he would fail to make good on his campaign promise to eliminate the National Park Service's $4.9 billion deferred maintenance backlog. Seven years later, the nicest way I can describe how things turned out is that the park service backlog -- now around $8 billion, by the way -- is no longer one of my top 50 anxieties about the state of the union.

With Bush we might have been able to read the tea leaves a bit more carefully, especially if the media, or for that matter Bush's opponent, had bothered to ask some tough questions. There's plenty of reason to suspect the worst from McCain, but he still gets a pass from way too many people.

Despite his consistent party-line voting record, some independents and Democrats still think of Senator McCain as the most palatable, independent-minded Republican. But this is the sort of empty compliment a friend of mine once compared to being called "the coolest Osmond."

Senator McCain's name will not appear on ballots under the category "Maverick." A vote for him is a vote for the Republican Party, which is to say the people who were standing there on the floor in Minnesota all week long chanting, "Drill, baby, drill," or rattling maracas to cheer on Mitt Romney as he bragged, "Just like you, there's never been a day when I was not proud to be an American." Really? Not even on Abu Ghraib thumbs-up photo day? Or Superdome bedlam day(s)?

A persistent theme in Republican attacks against Obama is that you [the voter] don't know what he'll do once he gets into power. All you can tell now is that he says now, but most likely he's just saying that to get you to vote for him, so he can get into power and do whatever it is he really wants to do, whatever that is -- surely something awful bad. Like many effective smears, this is based on a half-truth, which is that nobody ever knows how the future is going to play out. On the other hand, the Republicans have bound themselves together so tightly that their range, for any semi-loyal party guy, looks to be limited to continuing the slow decay as we deny all the problems that are accumulating to driving full-speed into one disaster after another. At least with Obama we have a guy who says he can see potholes and seems to be smart enough and attentive enough to occasionally hit the brakes and/or swerve out of the way (or, as the derogatory term puts it, "change course").

There are few things in life I hate more than betting, but this one seems pretty clear cut.

The last page of the New York Times Week in Review section was filled by a full-page ad for Thomas L. Friedman's new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution -- and How It Can Renew America. Looking forward to the Matt Taibbi review. (For last time, see here.) For a whiff, see Friedman's op-ed today ("Georgia on My Mind"). Last two paragraphs:

Alas, though, the Republicans just had a convention where abortion got vastly more attention than innovation, calls to buttress Tbilisi, Georgia, swamped any for Atlanta, Georgia, and "drill, baby, drill" was chanted instead of "innovate, baby, innovate."

If we were serious about weakening Putin and Putinism, we would be investing $1 billion in Georgia Tech to invent alternatives to oil -- the high price of which is the only reason the Kremlin is strong enough today to bully its neighbors and its own people.

There are almost ten serious errors in those two sentences -- a really remarkable density of denseness. About the only thing he did get right is that the Republicans are morons, but how tough a call is that? The idea that innovation is the answer to all our problems is cornucopian gospel, something the Republicans are quite happy with, even if they'd preface it by claiming that the way to innovate is to stop taxing businesses and profits, as opposed to, like, public investment in education and science. And we're not serious about stopping Putin/Putinism -- we need the enemies to keep us focused on guns (not butter). The oil business has been good to Russia, but Russia's a global power because they're a big country with lots of smart people -- at least if you consider figuring out how to blow up half the earth a sign of brains. They've been called "Upper Volta with missiles," but that doesn't mean that if you'd just (somehow) take away the missiles they'd just be Upper Volta. Moreover, even if you wanted to take away their oil business, you can't, for the simple reason that they got the oil and you don't. Nor is a paltry $1 billion investment anywhere going to invent "an alternative to oil" -- let alone Georgia Tech, who'd probably plow it into football anyway. And so on. Nobody else manages to turn gibberish into cliché more efficiently than Friedman.