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The thrust of this convention wasn't immediately apparent. So many people had said that Obama needed to define himself, to put some pillars under that lovely bridge he sketches across the sky. Convention planners seemed headed in that direction when they devoted the first day to a ho-hum...
...convention. Everyone knew how Obama would sound, but what would she say, after losing such a close fight for the nomination, and bearing all the inevitable resentments and what-ifs and wounded pride that entails? Clinton declared emphatically that she supports Obama, yet afterward many of the conventioneers were annoyed with how she said it. She didn't talk about about Obama's virtues. As several commentators put it, you could have replaced Obama's name in her speech with the name of any generic Democrat. All she seemed to care about was beating the Republicans...
As strategy, this is probably quite canny. There are two ways to think about change in this election, because neither candidate is asking to be re-elected. In one sense - the one the Republicans are sure to focus on at their convention in St. Paul next week - America is weighing...
Something is lost, though, in even the canniest strategy. Any time a campaign or candidate decides to run in one direction, other avenues inevitably close. Obama's decision to pursue this convention strategy meant that he would not build those pillars - because people can agree on throwing the bums out...
Left on the altar of the anodyne was a much more interesting convention that might have been. Some truly invigorating change was bubbling just below the surface of this gathering. Young, black Democrats like Cory Booker, mayor of Newark, and Adrian Fenty, mayor of Washington, D.C., talked openly about the...