She has a son going to Iraq; Joe Biden has a son going to Iraq. She has a baby with Down's Syndrome and is raising it with love; Biden lost a wife and daughter and raised his sons as only a truly loving father could have done.

She drives herself to work; he takes Amtrak home at night, not a chauffeured car. Her state is small; his is just as small -- even smaller. She is a staunch supporter of the war; Biden was the only Democratic presidential candidate to reject rapid withdrawal and to insist the situation is more complicated.

Yet if you didn't sense last night how deeply Sarah Palin channeled some of the country's deepest, most powerful currents of pent-up indignation and yearning, you don't sense the trouble we Democrats are in.

Rhetorically, she was the anti-Obama,. She was stirring precisely because she was so artless, matter-of fact, and "American" -- with no cadences or grand, historic resonances, but with plenty of mother wit and shrewdness. Credit her as much as the speechwriters..

The two currents she tapped -- the ones that roared up from so deep in the crowd that you could feel them riding on love more than hate -- weren't the ones unleashed by her or Rudy Giuliani's disparagements of Obama.

They were riptides of deeply wounded pride and groping loyalty, a yearning for vindication of something that is not to be disparaged at all.

The first such riptide was unleashed by Palin's and Giuliani's accounts of John McCain's career-threatening commitment, a year ago, when his campaign was hopeless, to an American military victory in Iraq, Right or wrong -- and i think it was wrong -- it was a commitment grounded in an uncommon courage that will be dismissed as stupidity only by smart-asses who really want to lose this election.

The second current was tapped by Palin's own grounded, calm confidence that "ordinary people's" common sense - her kind, and a lot of other people's - is what it takes to pull this country through its converging crises.

But if McCain and Palin bring character and faith of a kind which many Americans identify with instantly, they're also a lot more confused than even Ronald Reagan and the two George Bushes were about how to lead a government, and toward what.

For some reason, courage and generosity never showed McCain what they showed Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s -- the true dangers of our military-industrial juggernaut in a world where corporations are more powerful and corrupting than states and where the biggest threats to liberty are no longer taxes-taxes-taxes, and the strongest defense of liberty is no longer what now passes for "national security."

Trapped into making war for laissez faire, conservatives such as McCain and Palin can't reconcile their yearning for a sacred, ordered liberty with their obeisance to every whim of global capital, which is abandoning Palin's small-town America and Obama's urban America, a capital whose injustices and consumer palliatives are subverting our republican institutions and character.

About all this, they haven't a clue. To find one, their folksy common-sense, defiant courage, and religious faith are more necessary than some of us acknowledge or even understand, and therefore we may lose the election.

But common sense, defiant courage, and faith, while necessary, are not sufficient, and that is why, if McCain and Palin win, they will lose the America they mean to defend, as surely as America lost the pointless, vicious war that killed 58,000 Americans and countless others and made McCain a hero.