By Jon Ralston (contact)

Sun, Aug 31, 2008 (2:04 a.m.)

Denver — After a week of suffering through choreography-envy, where discord dissipated and unity reigned in a made-for-TV production Mike Deaver would have admired, this is all the Republicans can dredge up:

Barack Obama is a great orator but he does not have the experience to be president, and we will steal his thunder by plucking a female (hello Hillary voters!) vice presidential nominee from obscurity who has less meaningful experience than Obama.

That smell in the air is the unmistakable scent of desperation from a GOP led by a candidate the base did not want, confronting a foe unlike (in so many ways) any it has ever encountered and forced to run a campaign on the notion Deaver’s most famous client, Ronald Reagan, would have been astounded to hear: Words don’t matter.

Of course they do. And the Republicans must have been cringing all week as they watched Obama, especially in his acceptance speech at a throbbing Invesco Field, tear down the wall of cynicism erected by an administration that has tarnished the brand Reagan personified.

Indeed, the most salient part of a soaring speech dotted with transcendent moments was Obama’s description of how too many (and not just Democrats) have come to view the GOP philosophy:

“What it really means is that you’re on your own. ‘Out of work? Tough luck, you’re on your own. No health care? The market will fix it. You’re on your own. Born into poverty? Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, even if you don’t have boots. You are on your own.’ ”

In a country where people have seen the American Dream become a nightmare, where they have lost faith in their government in Watergate Era-like numbers, Obama believes he has tapped into something, as he said Thursday, stirring across America.

What scares the Republicans is they know he is right. They can sneer at him as The Chosen One, but they know, as Reagan did, that words do matter, that the ability to inspire people is not just part of being president, it should be a prerequisite for the office.

They know. So when Obama said Thursday — repeating a leitmotif — to the Mile High crowd that “this election has never been about me; it’s about you,” he couldn’t have been more wrong.

This election is entirely about Obama and his inarguable attempt to elevate the level of political discourse and in so doing to expand the electorate. The GOP cannot have that. So all the Republicans have as a response is a sledgehammer attempt, through John McCain’s dramatic and unexpected choice of little-known Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, to try to minimize Obama’s convention bounce because they are so afraid of what effect his candidacy is having on voters across the spectrum.

They have no choice but to resort to the tactic they execute so well and so successfully: fear-mongering. And Obama launched a preemptive strike Thursday because he knows what is coming.

“If you don’t have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from,” Obama said Thursday. “You make a big election about small things.

“And you know what? It’s worked before ...”

The GOP now must deal with its messiah complex and portray Obama as a false god not by debating the merits of his policy proposals or rising to his rhetorical heights. The Republicans this week will try to return the discussion to a playing field on which they have been very successful, one where swift boats become candidate-destroyers, where burning flags immolate hopefuls.

They cannot afford to have this election be about big things and Obama knows that, which is why he crafted that speech to anticipate the GOP attacks and to electrify the base with his promise not to shy from the fight. His words mattered. But for how long?

Abraham Lincoln, another relatively inexperienced and inspiring fellow from Illinois who ranks somewhere above George W. Bush in the presidential rankings and to whom Obama was compared to by Al Gore, had words at Gettysburg that might apply to Obama’s speech and political conventions in general: “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here.”

McCain and the Republicans certainly hope the Denver convention passes into the electorate’s memory quickly and harmlessly. The selection of Palin was the first step to erase it from the public consciousness; this week in St. Paul, Minn., is the second. With only two months until the election, the GOP has very little time left to make the case, a case that their beatified Reagan would recoil from, that words don’t really matter.