John McCain gave a decent acceptance speech. It was gracious and affecting. But when you look closely at his proposals, there wasn’t much there but the same old, same old.

He did part company, rhetorically, with partisanship.

“I don’t work for a party,” he said. “I don’t work for a special interest. I don’t work for myself. I work for you.”

He pledged to have Democrats and Independents in his Administration.

And he excoriated members of his own party first for giving in to the “temptations of corruption,” but also for more substantive sins. By implication, he skewered George W. Bush and Dick Cheney themselves for making government bigger, for passing “another corporate welfare bill for oil companies,” and for valuing “our power over our principles.”

These weren’t lines designed to ingratiate himself with the Republican stalwarts at the convention. Nor was his liberal approach to the issue of immigration.

“We believe everyone has something to contribute and deserves the opportunity to reach their God-given potential, from the boy whose descendants arrived on the Mayflower to the Latina daughter of migrant workers,” he said. “We’re all God’s children, and we’re all Americans.”

But then he threw in with the culture warriors of the right by endorsing “a culture of life” and by denouncing judges who “legislate from the bench.” (Of course, he threw in with Sarah Palin, too.)

On the two most important domestic issues to Americans—health care and the economy—his speech fell woefully short.

He proposed zilch on health care. All he said was: “My health care plan will make it easier for more Americans find and keep good health care insurance.” He didn’t say what his plan was, or how it would accomplish that. And he resorted to the oldest canard about Democrats forcing “families into a government-run health care system where a bureaucrat stands between you and your doctor.”

Just about every American knows that right now an insurance industry bureaucrat or a hospital administrator stands between us and our doctor. And any American on Medicare can tell you that government-funded health care really works.

On the economy, McCain opened the ancient Republican playbook: free trade, less government spending, lower taxes on individuals and businesses. But in a weak economy, the last thing you want to do is cut government spending, since it will only deepen the downturn, as happened in the Great Depression. Not for nothing did McCain, early in the campaign, acknowledge that he doesn’t know much about economics.

He painted Obama as a tax-hiking job killer, when in actual fact, Obama will give more tax breaks to the bottom 80 percent of Americans than McCain will, and they are the ones with the pent-up demand for goods and who are most likely to spend the money the fastest, thus jump-starting the economy.

McCain gave only two specific proposals that would directly help anyone but the very rich. The first was “doubling the child tax exemption from $3,500 to $7,000.” And the other was aimed at displaced workers. McCain said he would “make up part of the difference in wages between their old job and a temporary, lower paid one.” He didn’t spell out how he would do that, though.

For a guy who can’t even e-mail, it was odd to hear him say, “We have to catch up to history” and design government functions in tune with “the information technology revolution.”

And like Obama, he talked about moving the country off of foreign oil and creating jobs with new energy sources.

On foreign policy, he rattled sabers with Russia, even as he said he would work to “establish good relations” with it and didn’t want “a return to the Cold War.”

He denounced Russia’s invasion of Georgia, saying, “We can’t turn a blind eye to aggression and international lawlessness.” But he certainly did that when he pushed so hard for the invasion of Iraq back in 2002 and 2003.

He vowed to build an “enduring peace,” and said, “I hate war,” though Presidents usually clear their throat with that phrase just before they start bombing some country.

He left no doubt that he would be a fighter.

Like Hillary Clinton, he repeatedly vowed to “fight for you.” He used the word “fight” 25 times, and the word “fought” ten times.

And he ended his speech with a series of declarations about who and what he would fight for.

He got a shot in against Obama when he said, “I’m not running for President because I think I’m blessed with such personal greatness that history has anointed me to save our country in its hour of need.”

Yet mostly he stayed above the snarkiness that so typified the Republican Convention.

He even told people to “ “defend the rights of the oppressed” and “comfort the afflicted.”

But nowhere did he suggest that he would afflict the comfortable.