Onward To Obama's Historic Night

VP Nominee Biden And Bill Clinton Wrap Up Slew Of Powerful, Yet Preliminary, Speeches

by Ronald Brownstein

Thursday, Aug. 28, 2008


Now the spotlight settles on Barack Obama.

For three nights the Democratic convention has skittered from speaker to speaker and story line to story line -- the personal journey of Michelle Obama, the fragile reconciliation between the nominee and the Clinton family, and the introduction on Wednesday night of Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware as the party's vice presidential selection.

A grab bag of speakers have praised Obama and lashed presumptive GOP nominee John McCain in speeches that have oscillated between the emotional (Edward Kennedy and Michelle Obama), the methodical (Hillary Rodham Clinton), and the predictable (just about everyone who has spoken before the prime-time network window).

On Wednesday afternoon, Obama formally became the first African-American presidential nominee of a major party after Hillary Clinton dramatically appeared during the roll call of the states and asked her supporters to join in endorsing Obama's nomination by acclamation. Later Wednesday night, the convention's tone notably toughened with forcefully argued speeches from Biden, former President Clinton, and 2004 presidential nominee John Kerry that ranked among the week's most pointed and effective. Just before the network hour of prime-time coverage ended, Obama himself briefly appeared on stage to embrace Biden and his extended family.

But tonight at Invesco Field, the stage will belong entirely to Obama, the meteoric political talent who toppled the Clintons with fierce efficiency and persistence this spring but has struggled at times trying to introduce himself to the far larger audience that will decide his fate in the general election this fall.

Obama tonight will speak to his largest audience yet, not only the more than 76,000 supporters expected to crowd into the stadium but a vast television audience as well. It will be his best opportunity so far to respond to the drive this summer by the McCain campaign and conservatives to portray Obama as a vapid celebrity and doctrinaire liberal -- a drive that polls show has left some noticeable dents in the Democrat's public image.

In tonight's speech, Obama has four principal goals, David Plouffe, his campaign manager, said in a Wednesday morning interview with reporters and editors from Convention Daily and other Atlantic Media publications. Those goals, Plouffe said, are to explain "where he comes from, who he's going to fight for, what his change means, and the contrast with John McCain. And I think if we accomplish those things in some depth, it will be a very successful night."

Separately, David Axelrod, the campaign's chief strategist, told reporters traveling with Obama that the senator from Illinois was still "refining... and buffing" the speech. Axelrod said that Obama will develop one of the convention's central themes so far by detailing what he views as "the risks of continuing down the road we're on, which is plainly what Senator McCain is offering, and he's going to talk about an alternative path... and the kind of future that we can build if we take it."

Democrats prepared for tonight's culminating rally with a Wednesday night program that quickened the pace and sharpened the somewhat diffuse focus of the convention's first two nights. It was highlighted by Biden's address and perhaps even more so by Bill Clinton's brisk and cogent speech, which appeared to draw a more enthusiastic response than the remarks from his wife on Tuesday night.

Relegated to a secondary spot before the networks' prime time, Bill Clinton was greeted with a lengthy ovation that sounded cathartic after all the tension between him and Obama supporters this year.

Republicans instantly sent out releases citing some of Clinton's earlier criticism of Obama's experience, and questions about the former president's commitment to the nominee are sure to persist beyond this week. Today, there's bound to be continued chatter about Clinton's decision to fly to Los Angeles to stay with a college friend rather than remain in Denver to attend Obama's address tonight. Clinton advisers say that he also left early in both 2000 and 2004 to avoid upstaging the nominees, but given all the bruised feelings in this race, some Obama backers are bound to take his absence as a slight.

On Wednesday, though, Clinton could not have been more fulsome in his praise of Obama. He did what his wife did not the previous evening by commending not only Obama's agenda but also his qualifications for the presidency. "Everything I learned in my eight years as president and in the work I have done since, in America and across the globe, has convinced me that Barack Obama is the man for this job," Clinton declared. "Barack Obama is ready to be president of the United States."

Clinton also offered a much more personal connection with Obama than Hillary Clinton attempted the night before by likening the GOP attacks on Obama's experience to the similar charges leveled against him during his 1992 campaign.

"We prevailed in a campaign in which the Republicans said I was too young and too inexperienced to be commander in chief," he said. "Sound familiar?" And Clinton drew a lesson from this year's epic primary that his wife conspicuously avoided when he declared that "the long hard primary tested and strengthened" Obama.

Clinton's speech might have been the crispest argument yet delivered for Obama at the convention. It was telling that when the former president first stepped on stage, cameras caught Michelle Obama with a tentative and ambivalent look; but as Clinton warmed to his case, she was repeatedly seen cheering and smiling.

Similarly, Dennis D. Williams, a Midwestern regional director of the United Auto Workers who was sitting with the Iowa delegation as a guest, said that heading into Clinton's speech he had been disappointed at the "lukewarm" support the former president had offered for the nominee. But after the speech, he was effusive about Clinton's remarks. "If he had his pain, he put it aside and talked about how America is suffering," Williams said. "I've never heard him talk so compassionately about a candidate other than his wife."

Clinton was relatively gentle in his comments about McCain. But otherwise the evening's tone toward McCain was much more confrontational than during the first two nights. Some of the convention's sharpest language yet came from Kerry, a fellow Vietnam veteran who sought to attract McCain as his running mate after capturing the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004.

After declaring that he had "known and been friends with John McCain for 22 years," an animated Kerry cudgeled the presumptive Republican nominee with the same arguments that Republicans used against Kerry himself in 2004. In biting language that even reprised one of George W. Bush's toughest jabs against Kerry, the senator from Massachusetts portrayed McCain as a flip-flopper who has shifted his positions to mollify the conservative base of the GOP.

"Candidate McCain now supports the war-time tax cuts that Senator McCain once denounced as immoral," Kerry declared. "Candidate McCain says he would now vote against the immigration bill that Senator McCain wrote. Are you kidding me, folks? Talk about being for it before you're against it."

Colloquial, emotional, and engaging, but frequently mangling his lines early in his address, Biden was somewhat overshadowed by Bill Clinton. But Biden left no doubt that he was comfortable playing the "attack dog" role that many Democrats felt was slighted by the previous two vice presidential nominees, Joe Lieberman and John Edwards.

Like Kerry, Biden described McCain as a friend before subjecting him to a staccato barrage of criticism in which he repeatedly dismissed the Republican's policies with the refrain: "That's not change; that's more of the same." Biden also emphasized the blue-collar roots that were one reason Obama selected him with an account of his upbringing, and a heartfelt acknowledgment of his 91-year-old mother, Catherine, in the audience that at times had him on the verge of tears.

Those were affecting moments; but like everything else that has happened in Denver this week, they were all preliminaries. The main event comes tonight.

Paul Starobin, Alexis Simendinger, and National Journal/NBC embedded reporter Athena Jones contributed to this story.

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