Denver dispatches - Erik Tarloff - 28th August

Before I begin in earnest, I do want to point out that my prediction in my first post in this series, about Hillary Clinton's strategy for the Wednesday night rollcall (interrupting the vote to move the nomination be declared unanimous by acclamation), proved to be 100% accurate. Forgive the self-advertisement, but having so spectacularly failed to anticipate the quality of her Tuesday night speech, I'm aware my bona fides need a little burnishing, and if I don't do the burnishing, who will?

Up through yesterday afternoon, the general consensus was that this convention was mediocre or worse. The Clintons, it was widely believed, and as I've reported in these blogs, were angry and disconsolate, Hillary's supporters were stubbornly recalcitrant when it came to shifting their loyalties, the PUMAs were threatening trouble on the convention floor and off, and Obama's candidacy was failing to connect with the American public. Even Hillary's terrific performance on Tuesday night was adduced as evidence of the convention's inadequacy, although the logic of that position wasn't clear to me; some commentators actually said the speech was "too good," that she had set the bar for Obama too high, that she had primarily once again shifted everyone's attention to herself. Maureen Dowd even wrote in The New York Times that the mood of the convention was dominated by raw hatred.

What a difference a day makes.



Something dramatic happened Wednesday night; the Democratic stars were in some kind of alignment. The major speeches --- from Kerry, Biden, and most especially Bill Clinton --- were first-rate. The case against Bush and McCain, which many observers felt had been lacking on earlier nights, was made forcefully and, it seemed to me, irrefutably. The specific case for Barack Obama, which some complained Hillary Clinton had failed to make in her otherwise excellent presentation, was offered with every appearance of sincerity and even high passion by her husband (although one friend of mine mentioned afterward that Clinton had taken a very deep drink of water after the first ringing endorsement in the speech, as if washing down some especially unpalatable medicine). His reputation may have been on the line, and he may have therefore felt obliged to demonstrate his best form, but nevertheless, it must have taken awesome strength of will to subdue an unruly, obstinate, instinctual drive to subvert his chosen message. (A variety of people I know who are friends of the Clintons are so unanimous in describing him as emotionally unreconciled to the Obama candidacy --- much more so than his wife --- that I don't regard this as a matter for doubt.) The cliche in American politics and sports when someone comes through in a make-or-break situation like this is, "He did what he had to do." But last night he did much more than that; he did it forcefully, eloquently, and persuasively. He was Bill Clinton at his best, and at his best Bill Clinton is the most skillful politician of his generation.

My wife and I watched the speech on television in a small office just offstage. After the speech concluded and the applause finally died down (and the house band started playing "Addicted to Love," a waggishly mischievous choice that could not have been accidental), there was a flurry of activity in the corridor just outside where we were sitting, and then a posse of Secret Service flew by, and then the man himself appeared, flushed and sweating from his recent effort. As he approached, he glanced into the room in which we were sitting, noticed us, came in, greeted us, gave my wife a kiss, shook my hand, and then asked, "Was it okay?" A very human moment. We assured him it had been magnificent. I don't know what effort it required of him, and there's no guessing what internal resistance he had to overcome, but he gave it everything he had.

Biden too was excellent. The homely specifics he offered, the anxious domestic scenes he evoked, provided a visceral apologia for practical liberalism, and unmasked the economic policies of the Republicans as the mean, pinched, small-minded things they are. Even his famous angry loquacity seemed to work for him, felt like a genuine expression of overflowing feeling. And his personal story is surely one of the most dramatic and poignant in American politics. When he lit into McCain, it didn't feel like a rote partisan exercise. It seemed an expression of deep personal outrage.

The mood in the hall last night was something palpable. As the evening proceeded, and as each dramatic moment built on what had preceded it, there was a discernible sense that the convention was coalescing in ways that had seemed improbable a couple of days before. The roars of excitement were genuine and spontaneous—and deafening!—and the urgent, quickening notion that something historic was taking place before our eyes was undeniable. Soon after Laura and I left the hall, we ran into Congresswoman Rosa DeLaura (D, CT), a friend, and she gave me her trademark lopsided smile and said, "We're going to win. We're really going to win."

Now, I suppose a prediction like this from a professional politician, an office-holder, can be dismissed as mandatory boiler-plate optimism. But later, over dinner, a friend of mine whose saturnine temperament leads him to interpret any event in the most negative light possible—this is the man who accurately and precisely predicted, at the height of partisan enthusiasm during the 2004 Democratic convention, what the Republicans would do to John Kerry and what the final outcome would be—said to me, "I honestly don't see how Obama can lose."

Well, I do. I don't want to leave the impression I'm unreservedly endorsing his point of view. There are plenty of ways, and plenty of reasons, McCain can emerge victorious, and I'll try to indicate some of these in my next post. But that caveat noted, it's still true that if I were a betting man, right now I'd put my money on Obama. And I'm not sure I would have said that yesterday.

One small final note: There was an interesting development yesterday in the story of that PUMA group I've previously mentioned, the assortment of Hillary-lovers who now support John McCain and who have received so much attention in the press lately. Blogger Amanda at Pandagon has done some reporting: It appears the co-founder of the group, a woman named Darragh Murphy, was a donor to McCain in 2000 and has never given a penny to Hillary's campaign. She's a mole! The organization is a fraud! Let's see if the press shows any inclination to follow up on this. I'm not holding my breath.