Democratic Convention Recap

Barack Obama has shown incredible organizing and oratorical excellence. He and his staff did a superb job in putting together this convention and making it both entertaining and enlightening. The orchestration of this event proved to be pitch perfect. The concerns about the two Clinton’s sucking the oxygen out of the room proved unfounded. The Clinton’s were excellent and reinforced the party unity theme. They did not overshadow Obama as Thursday nights unparalleled acceptance speech demonstrated. The setting for that speech was incredible - about two hours before Obama spoke it was obvious to everyone that Obama had pulled off a brilliant move. I sat at home and said “oh my God, he is going to pull this off”. And he did. When Pat Buchanan and Joe Scarborough, both Republicans, are awe struck, you know you’ve done something right. There were very few dead spots during the four day convention run - even average folks like Barney Smith who talked about government focusing on people like him rather than “Smith Barney”. A nice touch. Tammy Duckworth, a double amputee Iraq war veteran and rising Democratic Party star was a great presence at the convention.

Joe Biden has proven to be an outstanding choice as vice president. He is experienced in domestic and world affairs, has strong family values, a compelling life story, and another great speaker and debater. This looks like an excellent fit.

From my perspective, I would have liked to seen Dennis Kucinich have a more prominent role at the convention other than as a speaker in non-prime team. He is the heart and soul of the “liberal” Democratic part of the party. He wowed the audience with his speech that hardly anybody saw. He has the ability to attack the Republican Party at all their vulnerable spots and there are many. I also had concerns about why the Democrats weren’t hitting Republican’s harder except for Kucinich. Those fears were also unfounded as Barack Obama came out fighting and delivered a speech for the ages.

There were some great slogans that emerged from this convention and one comes to mind: No way, No how, No McCain - Hillary Clinton. I had some others written down but lost my notes.

I found the best way to watch the convention on television was to tune in CSPAN. That way it was possible to watch the convention without all of the talking heads on the cable networks filtering the coverage. After the gavel came down each night, I turned over to the cable networks to get the instant analysis. It wasn’t all that great - Fox News was abysmal in their negative coverage. They reinforced why I don’t watch them for news. CNN was a little better but too cynical for my taste and too preoccupied with moving on to the Republican convention. Cambell Brown got exasperated last night and paraphrasing said “wait a minute, let’s talk about what happened here tonight” and went on to talk about how well it all came off. MSNBC had the best analysis - Matthews, Olbermann, Maddow, Todd, and Buchanan are a formidable reporting team especially when augmented by the NBC Evening News team and Tom Brokaw.

One commentator this morning summed it up: when Barack Obama came on the stage last night in that majestic setting -and he looked presidential! That’s exactly what I thought. Now its time to roll up our sleeves and get to work to make sure Barack Obama is elected as the next president of the United States.