The Springfield prologue to the Obama-Biden show has the beat. I hear a particular note, a leitmotif. Obama: "overcome the adversity of the last eight years." Biden: "The next president of the United States is going to be delivered into [the world]...The reckoning is now...These times require more than a good soldier, they require a wise leader."

It's the Biblical note. When George Bush used to do it, we called it signalling--telling the base that he's one of them. I think we're hearing it again, which is a good thing. The base that Obama's going for overlaps with what used to be the Bush base of believers. Obama mentioned Biden's Catholicism. These guys will not surrender the mantle of righteousness.

The upsweep through adversity into the sunny future--this is the classic pattern of the American civic-political speech going back to the 17th century. Sacvan Bercovitch wrote about it memorably in The American Jeremiad.

Now for the adversity and the reckoning.

If you want to take a break from news about Obama's articulate and bright and clean V-P choice (hat-tip to John Dickerson), get a load of this. In a trough of the manic-depressive cycle about Obama's summer doldrums, I among others was dismayed last weekend when Obama seemed so downright (if admirably) professorial ("you could argue that....") around Rick Warren. I didn't find out till later in the week that in an interview with Christian Broadcasting Network's David Brody the same weekend, Obama plainly said that his antagonists charging him with infanticide were lying. He said it directly, looking at Brody straight, yet without raising angry-black-guy alarms. He didn't sound whiny a la Bob Dole "stop lying about my record." He didn't sneer. He sounded righteous without going nasty. It's the right way to confront McCain when the time comes. Go to YouTube and take a look (search "david brody obama"). Here's the transcript.

ABC World News Tonight's Charlie Gibson introducing the network's lead piece on McCain and Obama, Thurs., Aug. 21:

Today, the two got into a dispute about which of them is richer.

No, that's not what happened. McCain said he didn't know how many houses he and his wife owned--4? 8? (Politico says 8.) His campaign accused Obama of owning one big house in Chicago, with four fireplaces and a wine cellar. (That part is evidently true.)

By Politico's calculation, McCain's properties are worth more than 7 times Obama's.

Below is how the AP sums up the McCain family wealth:

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It's pretty presumptuous to propose language to Barack Obama, but here goes anyway, in accord with Josh's suggestion that Obama's complaint about McCain casting aspersions on his patriotism rings tinny.

John McCain has the gall to question my judgment about how our country should act in the world? Why would he do that? He has two reasons: He wants to distract you from his own bad judgment. And he wants to distract you from the bad judgment of the Bush administration that he has supported and that he now wishes to prolong. Sen. McCain is quick to temper and quick to war. For many years he has supported "rogue-state rollback"--his chief foreign policy adviser coined that expression. Sen. McCain wanted to attack Iraq when there was no evidence Saddam Hussein had anything to do with the Al-Qaeda attacks on us, no evidence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, and even when the U. N. had not finished its inspections to find out.

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I've been wondering why Arizona reporters don't get much national exposure. Since McCain is running on "character," wouldn't reporters who've covered his local doings for a quarter-century be useful witnesses?

I'm far from expert, but I've been asking around and was advised to check out John Dougherty's stuff in The Washington Independent, exposing the smudges on McCain's pretty Arizona picture. Dougherty is a freelance based in Phoenix. He does his homework.

One of Dougherty's recent pieces exposes McCain's "ranch" as no ranch at all: It's a vacation home in a subdivision. But MSM unthinkingly call it a ranch. Google "mccain ranch" and you'll see what I mean.

McCain has a lot riding (sorry) on his ability to sustain the rough-riding image. He is, of course, the latest in a line of out-of-the-west, rawhide-wrapped Republicans: Goldwater, Reagan, Bush II. As Dougherty reminds us, Teddy Roosevelt launched the rugged individualist brand, and had an authentic claim to it. Now it's become shtick. The brush-cutter in jeans is not a sure-fire image, quite (see under: Goldwater), but overall it's a winning persona in a country that believes in making itself perennially new on the vanished frontier. All the more reason to peek beneath the persona and see who's wearing the mask and the $520 loafers.

Bigfoot media, isn't it time to get Dougherty, a real Arizona reporter, more exposure? Sunday show bookers? NPR?