Obama Delivers!!!

Obama did it!

He delivered a big speech, flawlessly, in front of a huge audience, in a stadium filled with the perfect imagery.

The fact the the press was carping and wondering all week if he could pull it off only made it better. (CNN still managed to have as its "fact" as Obama took the stage a statement about Geraldine Ferraro being the only woman on a major party ticket; perhaps when McCain takes the stage they'll have as their "fact" that the GOP has never nominated anyone who wasn't a white man, and indeed hasn't even had anyone else come close.)

Our hats are off the Barack: he'll get a big bounce out of this one. McCain's plan to unveil his veep tomorrow may even backfire.

Next week, the Democrats get to play the little game the Republicans have been playing this week of trying to make news during the other guy's convention. We'll bet Obama will do a pretty good job playing that game.

McCain will have his day, but we hope the media will contrast his nearly all-white, largely male audience of 10,000 or so to Obama's true big tent outdoor speech in front of 75,000.

Looking Forward To Obama

We missed a good chunk of last night's convention, but we liked what we saw!

Hillary interrupting the roll call to request unanimous consent was terrific stagecraft.

Bill Clinton's speech was wonderful. Our correspondent at the convention confirmed that Bill's speech was "hugely well-received" on the convention floor by delegates of all stripes.

We missed a speech that John Kerry gave, but our correspondent said it was probably one of Kerry's best ever. (Despite Kerry's evident pre-speech nervousness--he said it was easier to come up with a speech when he was the nominee.)

We did watch all of Joe Biden's speech and it made us feel a lot better about his selection as the Veep candidate. Biden's mom was terrific on television. We loved when she was caught on camera mouthing "that's true" to her seatmate when Biden spoke of being sent back out, after being beat up by an older kid, to "bloody his nose."

Our correspondent also had the good fortune to be talking to Biden, at a post-speech party, when Michelle Obama walked up. "She's quite tall," our correspondent tells us. Interesting--we couldn't tell that on television. Mrs. Obama told Senator Biden that she, too, was impressed with his mom and wanted to meet her, so off they went to find her.

As for the continued media fascination with disaffected Clinton supporters, our correspondent suggests it is way overblown, certainly based on what he's seen on site. At the outset, there was some visible tension, but by the end, he says, most delegates had seen the wisdom of being united against the common foe: McCain and the GOP.

He noted Maureen Dowd's column yesterday focusing on alleged continued infighting between the Obama campaign and Clinton loyalists, and said that while some of that is just natural and to be expected in any campaign, it's more in the nature of legitimate disagreements than any kind of mean-spiritedness.

We're confident that divisions lurk in the Republican Party too. No doubt, many evangelical leaders are disappointed with McCain's selection, and there are surely campaign staffers from Romney, Giuliani and other 40 candidates who disagree with some of McCain's strategic calls, but evidently the media has no interest in this.

Tonight, it's Obama's turn, and he'll have a huge crowd. It should be a good show.

Gag Us! The Mainstream Media's Convention Coverage Sucks

We doubt if we need to make this point, since you can see it for yourself, but doesn't the media coverage of the Democratic Convention just suck?

Granted, we can only watch a small slice at a time. Last night, we were watching NBC. While they carried Hillary's speech without interruption, the rest of the time it was all about NBC, not the convention.

Get this: we have three men--Brian Williams, Tom Brokaw and political analyst Chuck Todd--yacking on and on about Hillary and the glass ceiling, and how long it's been since Geraldine Ferraro and how much longer it will be. We bet all the women correspondents at NBC were thinking the same thing about THEIR employer.

[Note: they could have had the same conversation four years ago about a black man being a major party's nominee and no one would've mentioned Barack Obama. A woman will get the nomination some day--relatively soon--and it will be someone who comes out of nowhere, with a brilliant campaign, just as Obama did. Somehow these brilliant political analysts missed that point.]

The we have the endless yabbering about disaffected Hillary supporters and the divisions in the Democratic Party.

Remember when half the GOP was saying there was no way they'd support John McCain? Pathological liars like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh were saying they'd campaign for the Democratic nominee if McCain won. Where's the press on that story?

Worst of all, however, is that it's just a bunch of talking media heads and talking to, and interviewing, each other. Tonight we'll try some of the cable coverage, but we don't expect it to be much better.

Hillary Delivers; Warner Disappoints

At first, last night, we thought it a shame that NBC would deem it more important to air it's summer reality trash series "America's Got Talent" rather than the Democratic keynote address by Mark Warner. (The other networks also opted out of the keynote speech, although you could catch it on the cable news channels.)

After seeing Mark Warner's speech, however, we were just as glad it wasn't on primetime TV. We like Warner, and he'll make a terrific Senator. But it was a disappointing speech.

We wondered whether it was different at the convention, but alas, no. Our Denver correspondent reported: "Warner, unfortunately, disappointed. He looked great and had a good message, but delivered it less well than he is capable of doing. He lost folks in the hall midway through with his fairly slow and stolid cadence."

We didn't catch much of another speech, given by Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer, but what we saw we liked (by this time, we were watching NBC primetime coverage, which appears to be all about NBC--more on that in a separate post.)

Again, our Denver correspondent agreed: "Contrast [Warner] with Brian Schweitzer, who was a little cornpone but really got the crowd going - and I suspect looked okay on TV as well." Hey, a bit of cornpone is fine--especially after folks have been watching "America's Got Talent" and its ilk.

Anyway, the big moment--the critical speech--was Hillary's, and she did a brilliant job. As our man in Denver put it: "The universal buzz as we left the hall was how terrifically Hillary hit all the right notes in her speech. It went a huge way toward driving the nail in the 'angry Hillary voter' coffin."

She really couldn't have done any better. The mainstream media, of course, is still running around digging up sourpuss Hillary supporters because, after all, they need a story.

But Hillary's supporters need to listen to her most important point: she didn't spend all that time, money and effort running for President just so we could end up with four more years of Republican rule out of spite.

Note to disaffected Hillary supporters: grow up and get over it.

See our other post on the media's convention coverage.

Denver Convention: It'll Take More Than The Goo-Goo Dolls To Unite Democrats

Our intrepid correspondent from Denver has checked in:

"The press is of course playing up the Clinton vs Obama aspects of the convention. I thought these were largely overblown until last night at the DNC “Party with Your Party” bash featuring the Goo-Goo Dolls (who had the under 30-crowd tapping their feet and those over 30 shouting over the music “the who dolls?). I found myself in a bit of crossfire between some Obama supporters and some Clinton supporters (yes, who did happen to be women of a certain age) who are each plainly still stinging from wounds experienced during the long primary.

Having said that, I know the Clintons and know that they are superb role-players (and I don’t mean that in a negative way at all). Their job this week in their speeches will be to rally their supporters and enthusiastically support Obama – and I believe they will play those roles superbly, and predict that by Friday all the “ Clinton vs Obama” noise will have dwindled to nothing."

We think our correspondent is correct--both Clintons will do a bang-up job. We're glad the press has set up such low expectations.

It's Showtime!

Okay. The Olympics are over. They were a lot of fun, and quite memorable.

But now it's time for the two parties' political conventions, with the Democrats coming first, starting tonight. (By the way, the Democrats were foolish to schedule their convention the day after the Olympics ended--it's hard to top that spectacle, and a lot of Americans are exhausted from watching.)

For the Democrats, as it almost always is, a primary task is uniting the party. The convention should do a pretty good job of accomplishing unity. But what about going after McCain? Americans need to realize that, whatever they think of John McCain as a person, he also brings considerable baggage with him, i.e., the Republican Party that brought us George W. Bush.

Bush didn't get to be the worst President all by himself. He had a lot of help from a party that sought to politicize even the most mundane of government operations, a large cause of the administration's incompetency. McCain shouldn't be allowed to get away from his own party's legacy that easily.

That said, middle of the road Americans have some fears about Obama and the Democratic Party as well. Democrats seem to like to raise taxes to pay for all kinds of goody-two-shoes programs that don't quite work out the way they were supposed to.

Obama/Biden could effectively deal with this fear by focusing on the GOP's horrible fiscal irresponsibility and the need to get our financial house in order.

A second big fear of the independent voters who will decide the election is that Democrats are soft when it comes to foreign policy. Republicans are always creating bogeymen to rant and rave against (like Saddam Hussein, Iran, North Korea). In 1960, JFK talked tough about the Soviet Union and Cuba. Why not have Obama unleash some heavy duty rhetoric on Iran and Venezuela? It's not like he's going to have to attack them if he wins--even W hasn't done anything that stupid (yet).

Also, there's one very large piece of unfinished business out there: Osama Bin Laden. After eight years in office, Bush still hasn't rounded up this criminal murderer of more than 3000 Americans. Let's promise to get the bastard!

We hope to have some guest blogging this week from one of the Curmudgeon's friends who's at the convention. We're sure our readers will appreciate a different viewpoint for a change!