US Election: Republican Party is Pulled in Two Directions on First Full Convention Night

The first full, hurricane-delayed evening of the Republican national convention in St Paul revealed a party still trying to face in two directions at the same time. It offered a tale of two different political themes directed at two different political audiences. The first theme, for the audience at home watching on television, centered on John McCain's military career and his much vaunted leadership qualities. The second, aimed at the Republican delegates in the hall at the Excel Center, paraded his social conservatism to a party which in large parts remains skeptical that he is, at heart and by instinct, one of them.

Theme No 1 was embodied in the overarching slogan of the evening - Country First. It is a slogan with which all Republicans are deeply comfortable, whether they are social conservatives (which many are) or whether they are one-nation moderates (which a few still are - and which the closing speaker, the independent Democratic senator Joe Lieberman, certainly is). It is a classic broad tent political slogan, and on this first evening it was deployed in connection with a bewildering (and at times frankly incredible and contradictory) array of policies, anecdotes and historical figures. The purpose, though, was clear: to show that McCain's career and leadership claims - "Put country first with John McCain" - connect seamlessly with the party's history and can be sharply contrasted with the record of Barack Obama, whom Fred Thompson denounced as the most liberal and inexperienced presidential nominee in history.

"Country first" enabled the Republicans to celebrate the "quiet steady" way in which the late Gerald Ford (subject of a short video tribute) "put the country back together" after it had been misgoverned by an unmentioned president, Richard Nixon, who just happened to be a Republican, too. But it also enabled them to celebrate the far from quiet, far from steady qualities of McCain's 2008 effort to rebuild the country for a second time after it had again been misgoverned by a fellow Republican. At times it bordered on the politically absurd. "Some presidential nominees know more about service than others," simpered congresswoman Michelle Bachmann of Minnesota. The dig was intended for Obama - but it hardly squares with the military non-records of George W Bush and Dick Cheney. McCain is running against them too.

But not in this hall. That is why theme No 2 was mostly reserved for the cable channel parts of the evening - the ones that weren't relayed on the national television networks. This consisted of two principal conservative preoccupations: first, the reiteration of the party's religious right agenda, especially on abortion; and, second, the almost furtive celebration of George W Bush's eight years in the White House, which occupied less than half an hour of the evening and were largely entrusted to the consensual figure of Laura Bush.

Every reference to McCain's anti-abortion stance particularly hit the spot for the audience in the hall, none more so than Thompson's, which produced the biggest cheer of the night – though it may have gifted many watching undecided votes to Obama. At times the religious intensity of the party, which has always been there at the grass roots in the Bush years, threatened to get out of hand. At one point Cindy McCain was compared to an miracle-working angel. And when Bush, speaking by videolink from the White House but carefully not on prime time, endorsed McCain because he understood that "human life must always be defended" the audience in St Paul immediately got the message. It was a mixed-up evening for a mixed-up party - but a party that has not lost the will to win.