Sen. John McCain stands with ISOH/Impact’s president Linda Greene after he helped pack hurricane relief packages in Ohio.

AP / Stephan Savoia

And now, after two highly dramatic national conventions, the race is on.

John McCain, 72, emerges from last week’s Republican gathering in St. Paul heralded as a hero who endured torture for his country in Vietnam and celebrated as a gutsy maverick eager to fight to reform America. In GOP eyes, the Arizona senator is the seasoned voice of experience; you don’t want to take a chance on that raw rookie Barack Obama, do you?

In his acceptance speech Thursday night, McCain sought to shed the baggage of George Bush’s presidency and Republican domination of Congress in several recent years, to demonstrate that he is in touch with people’s problems, and to promise change.

“These are tough times for many of you,” McCain told the nation. “You’re worried about keeping your job or finding a new one, and you’re struggling to put food on the table and stay in your home.”

He said he does not work for a party, a special interest or himself. “I work for you.”

He said the GOP had fallen down. “We were elected to change Washington, and we let Washington change us.”

He promised, “I will reach out my hand to anyone to help me get this country moving again.

“My friends, I have that record and the scars to prove it. Senator Obama does not.”

You may be less interested in McCain’s record — or Obama’s — and more interested in which candidate’s skills and programs seem more likely to bring improvement to your life.

McCain’s nomination came at an extraordinary convention whose first night fell victim to concern over a Gulf Coast hurricane and whose entire run was marked by a national debate over his selection of Sarah Palin, 44-year-old first-term Alaska governor, for vice president.

Her confidently-delivered speech Wednesday night was a tour de force, combining some warm family touches, several lines to appeal to small-town America and a flurry of zingers for Obama, the Illinois senator who once was a community organizer in Chicago and whose comments about small-town Pennsylvanians touched off a brouhaha in the primaries.

Palin, former mayor of tiny Wasilla, said, “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a ‘community organizer,’ except that you have actual responsibilities. I might add that, in small towns, we don’t quite know what to make of a candidate who lavishes praise on working people when they’re listening and then talks about how bitterly they cling to their religion and guns when those people aren’t listening.”

Slash.

Obama took sharp exception to Republicans’ belittling community organizers. On the campaign trail, he asked, “Why would that kind of work be ridiculous? Who are they fighting for? ... Do they think that the lives of these folks who are struggling each and every day, that working with them to try to improve their lives, is somehow not relevant to the presidency?”

Obama, 47, was nominated by the Democrats the week before in Denver. He is the vigorous, inspiring speaker who touts a litany of solutions for a bright new day after eight dismal years of Republican rule. In Democratic eyes, who would want four more years of Bush?

And that is how the election will be fought: Obama voicing outrage over the struggle facing the middle class and blue-collar America, with McCain more into biography. Republicans want you to focus on the match-up of the candidates. In their lexicon, Obama is an over-promiser, with expensive ideas, and, really, he’s just a big talker.

Obama accepted the Democratic nod in a speech against an elaborate backdrop at Invesco Field at Mile High, a scene Palin mocked. Portraying herself as an unpretentious hockey mom, she asked, “When the cloud of rhetoric has passed, when the roar of the crowd fades away, when the stadium lights go out, and those Styrofoam Greek columns are hauled back to some studio lot, when that happens, what exactly is our opponent’s plan? What does he actually seek to accomplish after he’s done turning back the waters and healing the planet?”

She said he wants to “take more of your money,” a dubious claim in that Obama wants to cut taxes for most Americans.

But such is discourse in today’s campaigns.

By the way, whatever happened to the Iraq war? McCain boasts of his support for the surge, and of its success, but the war drags on. And Obama, who opposed the war when he was an Illinois state legislator and wants to get the troops out, now spends little time talking about it.

One way or the other, American history will be made on Nov. 4. Obama would be the first black president. If McCain wins, Palin becomes the first woman VP.

I’d like to believe this election will be worthy of its historic stakes. But I’m far from confident: I have seen the same kind of attack politics, the same kind of distortion, oversimplification and foolishness, the same kind of substitution of imagery for substance, that regularly mar American elections. Both McCain and Obama are bright and honest, but many people will consider one too old and the other too young. Further, I fear a silent bias against a black candidate. And, yes, in some quarters, I detect a vocal one against a woman.

McCain’s choice of Palin touched off a firestorm of criticism about her lack of experience — especially in foreign affairs — her record and his vetting process. This is all fair game.

McCain touted her executive roles and promoted her as a reformer and clearly was making a bid for the women’s vote, something the Democrats risked alienating when Hillary Clinton failed to land a slot on their ticket. While I welcome a woman’s running, I have plenty of concerns about Palin’s credentials. Still, I do think she is subject to a double standard, especially when people, sincere or needling, question her ability to try for VP when she has five children, including a baby with Down syndrome.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani was absolutely right when he asked in St. Paul, “How dare they question whether Sarah Palin has enough time to spend with her children and be vice president? How dare they do that. When do they ever ask a man that question?”

And Delaware Sen. Joe Biden, Obama’s 65-year-old running mate, also made a good point on ABC’s Good Morning America:

“This stuff about how can she be a governor and a vice president and raise … kids — come on! Whoever those folks are don’t know any strong women. They haven’t lived in a household like mine where my wife, you know, raised our kids and dealt with my career, taught full time. She’s in a classroom right now and she earned her doctorate at night…. Some of the stuff said has just been over the top, totally unfair and I think it has been sexist, and I think the way the governor has handled it has been admirable.”

As smooth, enthusiastic and cutting as Palin’s speech was, it’s important to remember that it was only a speech. Can this newcomer to the national stage also deftly handle interviews and hold her own in a debate with Biden?

And while the speech was a huge hit with GOP delegates, it had to have disappointed any TV viewers hoping Palin would offer proposals to ease the plight of the middle class — such issues as health care, jobs and college aid.

Palin, who, like McCain, opposes abortion rights, did not address that topic. Some people may have identified her with it anyway when she spoke about her 4-month-old baby, Trig, whom she chose to bear although she knew of his Down syndrome. “We were so blessed,” she said, and she told families of special-needs children that she wants to make America a more welcoming place for their sons and daughters.

One of the best visuals of the convention was of Palin’s 7-year-old daughter, Piper, matting down her little brother’s hair.

As far as I know, this was the first convention of either party in which a nominee’s pregnant 17-year-old daughter — Bristol Palin — appeared with a fiancé, 18-year-old Levi Johnston. I’ve heard a lot of people refer to the pregnancy; I have yet to see in it any relevance to the election.

Earlier in the week, I asked former Massachusetts Gov. Jane Swift what she thought. “I’m not going to talk about that,” she said, “nor should anybody else.”

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mike Dukakis, the 1988 Democratic presidential nominee, said, “That doesn’t concern me.” But he had plenty of other things to say about Palin — not complimentary, though he was more disgusted with McCain for picking her.

Swift, a McCain fan who was about to rush from her Williamstown home to head out to the St. Paul convention, called Palin a “bold choice” and declared, “She’s from outside of Washington, D.C., and that makes the guys crazy.”

As for the appeal Palin may have for women, Swift said, “It’s always great for my daughters and for me to see someone who relates to our life experience and to know what it’s like to get out the door to the airport on the day before school. But, on the other hand, I’m much more interested in her willingness to take on special interests, to shake up Washington.”

Swift asserted that Obama also lacks foreign policy experience, that McCain has plenty of savvy in that area, and that it’s nice to see he has a running mate “who can help him in what is often times an even more difficult task, which is taking on the status quo.”

Maybe that is nice. But Dukakis wasn’t buying it.

Of course, Dukakis likes Biden. Ironically, unbeknownst to Dukakis at the time, his 1988 campaign leaked a tape that helped drive Biden from that year’s White House race. The tape showed Biden, without acknowledgement, mouthing phrases from a British politician.

I am surprised that the news media or critics of the Democratic ticket have not turned more of a spotlight on the shortcomings that forced Biden from the 1988 contest. Dukakis said he doubts there’ll be much of a hubbub. “People don’t seem to be interested,” he said.

In last week’s interview from his office at Northeastern University, where he teaches political science, Dukakis said he’s delighted that Obama tapped Biden, “for all the right reasons — including the fact that he could be president of the United States if something happened to the president, a rather sharp contrast to the other side.”

Biden chairs Senate Foreign Relations and is big on Amtrak, a Dukakis crusade.

Dukakis, who could not believe it when he heard McCain picked Palin, said the single most important criterion must be that the VP could if necessary step in and be a first-rate president. He said he did things right when he tapped Sen. Lloyd Bentsen of Texas.

He said his campaign had teams of lawyers and accountants investigating Bentsen and three other finalists, Rep. Dick Gephardt and Sens. John Glenn and Al Gore. “They went into their backgrounds, their history, their finances, their taxes. [Campaign chairman] Paul Brountas interviewed them and their spouses at length. I interviewed them at length. Brountas went back and did another round of interviews.”

Dukakis added, “If you do the process right, it leads to the right result. It’s hard to describe, but remember, in 10 years as governor I had picked a ton of people.”

Dukakis said that when he’d been governor for as short a time as Palin — barely a year and a half — he was not ready to be president or even VP. He called the situation “absurd.”

Obama is in his fourth year as a senator from Illinois. I’m not here to endorse Obama, but it’s obvious that anyone serving in the Senate for three-plus years has more exposure to foreign policy matters than someone who’s served a year-plus as a governor. To be sure, Obama has been neither a governor nor a mayor.

Dukakis termed it “absolutely ludicrous” that Palin touts as a qualification that she commands the Alaska National Guard. Dukakis said, “I had a fair amount of contact with my National Guard and, of course, they were a critically important part of the Blizzard of ’78 effort.” But he said that is much different from sending troops into battle. “When fighting begins, the president of the United States federalizes them and they go to war under his authority, not the governor’s.”

Dukakis voiced alarm over assertions, denied by Palin, that she dismissed Alaska’s public safety commissioner because he refused to fire a trooper who’d been married to her sister.

As far as Dukakis could see, “There was simply no vetting process. I mean nobody in Alaska was talked to,” including the former commissioner and the legislator leading an inquiry into the flap.

Dukakis said Democrats should not ridicule Palin but instead raise questions about McCain’s judgment. “This is all about him.”

In 1988, George H.W. Bush’s pick for vice president, Dan Quayle, was widely scorned as in over his head. Bush won anyway.

Dukakis says, “Maybe I didn’t do as good a job as I should have raising questions about Bush’s judgment.”

Say what you will of McCain’s judgment (and I have a lot of trouble with his policies), but anyone watching Thursday night had to be moved by his closing.

He spoke emotionally of his Navy service and POW experience, and said that as president he would fight to make all Americans proud of their country. He declared:

“Fight with me. Fight with me.

“Fight for what’s right for our country. Fight for the ideals and character of a free people.

“Fight for our children’s future. Fight for justice and opportunity for all.

“Stand up to defend our country from its enemies. Stand up for each other, for beautiful, blessed, bountiful America.

“Stand up, stand up, stand up, and fight.

“Nothing is inevitable here. We’re Americans, and we never give up.

“We never quit.

“We never hide from history. We make history.”

McCain and Obama have their first TV debate on Sept. 26.

Be there.

M. Charles Bakst is The Journal’s political columnist.

mbakst@projo.com