Gerard Baker : McCain speech in full : Brady Bunch on steroids : Ferraro criticises 'sexist' media | Punters fail to take to Palin

If there is a widescreen television set so broad that it could capture in one fell camera shot all the children of John McCain and Sarah Palin seated in two vast rows of seats tonight, I would like to see it.

There were 12 of them, ranging in ages from 46 to five months. Three are adopted, including Mr McCain’s 17-year-old daughter Bridget, rescued from a Bangledeshi orphanage by his wife Cindy in 1993. One is pregnant – Mrs Palin’s daughter Bristol, 17. Another has served in Iraq – Jimmy McCain – while two others, his brother Jack and Track Palin, his new friend courtesy of his mother’s extraordinary rise to the Republican ticket, are due to deploy. Little Trig Palin, born in April, has Down’s Syndrome. Meghan McCain, 24, is a blonde fashion designer who has successively blogged the trivia of her father’s campaign for months.

The McCain-Palin ticket has not just scrambled this presidential race. It has given America a post-modern, new Republican version of the Brady Bunch, except there are a lot more of them. After Mr McCain ended his acceptance speech last night – an at times emotional call to service rooted in his five and a half years of suffering and forbearance in the Hanoi Hilton – they crowded onto stage. There was scarcely enough room, especially when Roberta McCain, the candidate’s 96-year-old mother, joined in, a clear eyed, energetic campaign asset whenever questions about her son’s age are raised.

For a year in which candidates say that their children are off limits, it has been hard to escape them lately. In a speech introducing her husband, Cindy McCain spoke movingly about Bridget, whom she met as a baby in a Dhaka orphanage after a devastating cyclone.

With the cameras trained on her daughter, a rare moment with Bridget in the spotlight, Mrs McCain said: “All around me were the children, and the desperate faces of their mothers. The pain was overwhelming, and I felt helpless. But then I visited an orphanage begun by Mother Teresa, and two very sick little girls captured my heart. There was something I could do. I could take them home. And so I did.

“Today both of those little girls are healthy and happy. And one of them you just met: our beautiful daughter Bridget.”

It was Bridget who was the focus of an appalling smear campaign against Mr McCain during his pivotal and losing 2000 South Carolina primary battle against George W Bush that he had a black child out of wedlock.

Mr McCain delivered a speech that reduced some in his audience to tears, because the story of his five and a half years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam - the beatings, the refusal of early release because his father was a US Naval admiral - is compelling. He was once reluctant to talk about it. Now he turns to it at every opportunity. It was the most stirring part of an otherwise faintly uninspiring and jumbled speech . “I fell in love with my country when I was a prisoner in someone else’s. I loved it not just for the many comforts of life here. I loved it for its decency; for its faith in the wisdom, justice and goodness of its people. I loved it because it was not just a place, but an idea, a cause worth fighting for. I was never the same again. I wasn’t my own man anymore. I was my country’s.”

Many in the crowd waved McCain-Palin banners, but one wonders if they are leaving the convention tonight thinking Palin – McCain. Courtesy of several tributes to his new running mate, who last week was the virtually unknown governor of Alaska, she got raucous standing ovations again after her barnstorming acceptance speech on Wednesday night. The Republican base has a new darling, yet who knows what the coming days will bring.

This has been the longest – and one of the strangest, most compelling, confounding US presidential races in history. The children on stage tonight, from the two over-40 stepsons from Mr McCain’s first marriage, both adopted, to Mrs Palin’s husband Todd, a champion snowmobiler known in Alaska as the “First Dude”, and the 18-year old father of his teenage daughter’s unborn child - was a reflection that you make predictions about US politics at your peril.

A McCain-Palin Brady Bunch ticket? Who would have thought it.