On this Election Day, the fates of John McCain and Barack Obama are now - finally - in the hands of Americans voters. But their respective destinies may have been determined by speeches each gave years ago. At the 2004 Democratic convention, Barack Obama introduced himself to the American people with a message of national unity and transformational change that has hardly changed since. But in May 2006, John McCain took to the stage of Reverend Jerry Falwell's Liberty University and, in a matter of minutes, erased everything he claimed to stand for.
As Hilary Rosen recently suggested, McCain's cynical rapprochement with Falwell and the religious right was the first in a cascading acts of political opportunism that undermined his supposed maverick image.
In his failed 2000 primary run against George W. Bush, McCain famously branded the likes of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as "agents of intolerance." During the decisive South Carolina primary, he paid a steep price for it.
So by early 2006, candidate McCain began his journey to what the Daily Show's Jon Stewart termed "crazy base world." In May of that year, McCain delivered the commencement address at Falwell's Liberty University, where the late minister praised his former foe, "the ilk of John McCain is very scarce, very small." Confronted by Tim Russert weeks before as to whether he still viewed Falwell as an agent of intolerance, McCain grudgingly owned up to his flip-flop, "no, I don't."
So it should have come as no surprise that among the topics McCain addressed on May 13, 2006 was tolerance:

"Americans deserve more than tolerance from one another, we deserve each other's respect, whether we think each other right or wrong in our views, as long as our character and our sincerity merit respect, and as long as we share, for all our differences, for all the noisy debates that enliven our politics, a mutual devotion to the sublime idea that this nation was conceived in - that freedom is the inalienable right of mankind, and in accord with the laws of nature and nature's Creator."

As it turned out, the distance from Jerry Falwell to Pastor John Hagee and the Reverend Rod Parsley was a short one. And the walk away from the "respectful campaign" John McCain promised was shorter still.
The contrast with the tone and consistency of Barack Obama could not be more stark. What the Illinois Senate candidate told the Democratic convention in Boston on July 27, 2004 was not only an historic moment in the annals of American political oratory; it was an unchanging statement of his core beliefs:

"Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes.
Well, I say to them tonight, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America; there's the United States of America.
There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America...
...We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America."

From that moment forward, Barack Obama has been a stalwart, unshakable messenger of national unity. 80,000 people at the Democratic convention in Denver and a viewing audience of millions more heard the same plea for hope, change and unity. Even yesterday in Jacksonville, Barack Obama again asked Americans to follow the better angels of their nature:

"Despite what our opponents may claim, there are no real or fake parts of this country. There is no city or town that is more pro-America than anywhere else - we are one nation, all of us proud, all of us patriots. The men and women who serve on our battlefields may be Democrats and Republicans and Independents, but they have fought together and bled together and some died together under the same proud flag. They have not served a Red America or a Blue America - they have served the United States of America."

Whoever emerges victorious today, it is worth remembering that elections are about choices made not just by voters. The candidates make fateful choices, too. Ultimately, Barack Obama chose to stay true to himself. But John McCain made different a choice. With his unending policy reversals, the selection of Sarah Palin and, above all, that cynical speech to Jerry Falwell's bastions, John McCain sought to appease his party's radical right all in the goal of securing the Republican presidential nomination. So much for putting "country first."