The speeches and the crowd at the Republican convention have left me dismayed.

John McCain got a lot of applause last night when he promised an end to politics as usual. No more partisan rancor, he said.

But the other convention speakers, who spent the previous nights whipping up the crowd, have shown how shallow that claim is. This was McCain's convention, orchestrated and vetted by his campaign. And the entire event consisted of personal attacks aimed at Barack Obama, worship of McCain's war record, and a scary appeal to mindless patriotism.

The low point in all this, best I can tell, was an address to the New York delegation yesterday by former State Senator Joe Bruno (reported by WXXI's Karen DeWitt and by the Albany Times-Union). Bruno compared Obama to Eliot Spitzer and hurled schoolboy taunts: Obama is a "wimp," Bruno said. "Fancy, dancy - prancy."

This is simply beneath the dignity of any politician. But it was consistent with the tenor of the Republicans' celebration: mean, angry, and entirely partisan.

It has been interesting watching the delegates at this convention - many of them Republican politicians, in a party beholden to wealthy special interests - cheering the calls for "reform." Their party has been in power for eight years. Their president led the country into war, resisted better fuel-efficiency standards, and fought health-care reform. And they know that if McCain is elected, there'll be no reform. They'll see to it.

In today's New York Times, David Brooks writes about the difficulty facing McCain: "John McCain is trying to reform the Republican Party before a presidential defeat, with the old guard still around, and with a party base that still hasn't accepted the need to transform. The central drama of this week's convention was the struggle by reform Republicans to break through the gravitational pull of old habits and create something new."

I didn't see any evidence this week that those "reformers" will succeed - or even that they want to. John McCain says he believes in bipartisanship, in the need to end the rancor. He says he believes in reform. But preceding him on the stage in the convention hall in St. Paul this week have been some of the most divisive Republicans in the country. McCain and his campaign choreographed the convention, and they approved of the speakers and their message. And McCain has picked a shrill, combative pit bull as his running mate.

Promises of reform sound nice. But this is the same old Grand Old Party, one that will tell any lie, exaggerate any action, do anything to get its candidates elected.