From a less objective vantage point here in Denver, I agree with J.P. Green’s assessment that the convention message operation is now fully on track. Bill Clinton fully addressed all the carping concerns expressed in the media (and by the McCain campaign) about the commitment of the Clinton’s to Obama’s cause, and also did an excellent job connecting the dots among Bush, McCain, and the conservative ideology of the Republican Party. The contextualizing of Biden’s speech–the video, Beau Biden’s intro, the “surprise” appearance of Obama–was perhaps even more effective than the speech itself. And in addition to the speeches Green touted, I thought John Kerry went after McCain quite well, particularly in the line about McCain needing to debate himself before debating Obama.
But it’s all a lead in to the Big Show tonight at Invesco Field. There are obviously some logistical challenges to this kind of event. In the Red Rehearsal Room yesterday, our speech trainer Steve Allen cleverly created a reverb effect to give speakers a taste of the acoustics of a football stadium. But I gather they’re going to have some sort of best-money-can-buy Grateful-Dead-style sound system, so it may not be that big a problem.
The biggest obsession for convention-goers yesterday was securing tickets for Invesco, which are very hard to come by. You can only imagine the hysteria that would have ensued had Obama delivered his acceptance speech in the much smaller Pepsi Center.

Well, it’s hard to imagine much more Hillary Clinton could have done last night to explicitly and implicitly ask her supporters to actively support Barack Obama. Sure, maybe she coulld have gone after John McCain at more length, but she had to do a lot of complicated things in this speech–most importantly, thanking her fans and telling them to vote for McCain or sit out the election would be a betrayal of their own efforts and values.
Aside from HRC’s speech, the most notable thing that happened last night was the slow but steady introduction of some red meat for the ravening Democratic delegates in the convention’s rhetorical diet–most obviously in the speeches of Brian Schweitzer, Ted Strickland and–to a lesser extent–Mark Warner.
But my favorite speech of the night, because she had rehearsed with us in the Red Room, was that of Lilly Ledbetter, the Alabaman whose lawsuit against the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company has become the contemporary symbol of the fight for gender pay equity. If you heard Lilly, you heard not only one of the purest Southern Appalachina accents around, but a strong personal story about the stubborness of sexism, and the need for leadership–executive, legislative and judicial–to overcome it. In a way, Lilly Ledbetter’s endorsement of Barack Obama should have been as compelling to women mourning Hillary Clinton’s loss as HRC’s own endorsement.
Check out Matt Yglesias’ reaction to Lilly’s speech, and be sure to read his quote from National Review‘s Jonah Goldberg deriding that same speech. And if you found Lilly’s speech powerfukl rather than ridiculous, you might not want to consider voting for Jonah’s candidate, John McCain. (UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist

One of the time-honored traditions of national political conventions is the struggle between convention manangers, who wish to promote the image of a relentlessly united and enthusiastic party, and the news media in search of controversy.
Inevitably, the struggle in Denver revolves around the Clintons, Hillary tonight and Bill tomorrow night.
To read some of the news accounts, HRC’s speech will represent a moment of high drama and political peril. Will Hillaryites stage some sort of protest? Will the ongoing negotiations on the precise staging of the roll-call vote tomorrow break down and break into public?
If you’re in Denver, and want to get on television, the most direct route is to pose as an angry HRC supporter who’s mulling over a vote for John McCain.
The reality is that HRC will almost certainly deliver a rousing unity speech, to an appreciative audience, and will personally offer the motion on Wednesday to make Obama’s nomination unanimous. Yes, Bill’s speech on Wednesday will be watched (just as his last two convention speeches were) for signs that he’s “upstaging” the nominee, though this year the nominee will be exceptionally difficult to upstage.
And in the end, all the talk about Obama/Clinton discord could actually increase the perception of unity, when the discord fails to materialize.

On the first formal day of the Democratic Convention, any pre-game jitters seem to be gone, and the show will soon begin.
Here in the Red Rehearsal Room (the other two, appropriately, are called White and Blue), we’ve just rehearsed AFL-CIO chief John Sweeney, and the who speech prep system seems to be functioning well. The total number of speakers is down noticably from past conventions (a good idea, IMO), and the number of what everyone calls “real people”–some who have personal stories to tell about Barack Obama, and other who exemplify one or another of the major convention themes–is up. Nobody seems to have been told they can’t criticize George W. Bush or John McCain, which is a nice change from the message straightjacket in Boston four years ago.

I’m in Denver from now through the week, working in one of the convention rehearsal rooms, and will try to regularly do some posts giving a flavor of the backstage scene.
As always on the eve of the convention, there’s a fair amount of confusion, with thousands of volunteers trying to find out where they are supposed to be and how to get the credentials to get there. Security is pretty heavy; there was a two-hour line yesterday morning for access to the Pepsi Center (the main convention venue). Downtown Denver is saturated with police officers, many in riot gear (today is apparently the big day for demonstrations). Best line I’ve heard so far was from a coffee shop waitperson who said: “The SWAT teams all have scuba gear; guess that’s in case there’s trouble at the Aquarium.”

Amidst the heat and light of the presidential campaign over the last week, it was easy to miss a pretty big development in Objective Reality. The long-awaited Status of Forces Agreement between the U.S. and Iraq includes a timetable for withdrawal of American combat forces by 2011, preceded by the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraqi “cities and villages” by June of next year.
Forget, if you can, the Bush administration spin on the agreement they signed. The political figure most threatened by it is John McCain, who has violently and consistently opposed any sort of withdrawal timetable on grounds that it would fatally endanger an impending U.S. military “victory” in Iraq.
Barack Obama’s reaction to the new deal in Iraq is obviously a big deal in terms of framing his position vis-a-vis McCain’s. Here’s part of what he said about it:

I am glad that the Administration has finally shifted to accepting a timetable for the removal of our combat troops from Iraq. Success in Iraq depends on an Iraqi government that is reconciling its differences and taking responsibility for its future, and a timetable is the best way to press the Iraqis to do just that. I welcome the growing convergence around this pragmatic and responsible position….
Senator McCain has stubbornly focused on maintaining an indefinite U.S presence in Iraq, but events have made his bluster and record increasingly out of touch with reality. While Senator McCain continues to offer unconditional military and economic support for Iraq, I strongly believe that we need to use our leverage with the Iraqi government to ensure a political settlement. In addition to a timetable, we should only train Iraqi Security Forces if Iraq’s leaders reconcile their differences, and we must insist that Iraq invests its $79 billion surplus on rebuilding its own country. It’s time to succeed in Iraq and to honor the sacrifice of our servicemen and women by leaving Iraq to a sovereign Iraqi government.

This is a pitch-perfect reaction, according to the typically acute and highly credible account of Spencer Ackerman:

First, it makes the point that the administration came around to the wisdom of Obama’s position after exhausting the alternatives. Second, it portrays Obama’s position as the consensus view. Third, it puts McCain on the horns of a dilemma: Either endorse Obama’s consensus position — and thereby flip-flop and concede his opponent’s judgment is superior — or be out of the responsible mainstream. Third-and-a-half, if McCain stays consistent, the Obama line draws a wedge between Bush and McCain.
But there’s a fourth reason, and it’s the most crucial of all. Did you notice how Obama is talking about “success in Iraq”? He’s taking that concept and giving it a common-sense meaning: getting out responsibly — that is, leveraging withdrawal into a diplomatic strategy with the Iraqi government and the region — is what success means. That, by the way, isn’t just a good campaign strategy. It’ll be a good governing strategy, giving the military its due respect from a civilian leader while taking up the arduous and tripwire-laden task of actually withdrawing.

If Obama can indeed define “success in Iraq” as what he, the Iraqi government, and even the Bush administration are talking about, leaving John McCain with the options of either raving on the sidelines about military victory or admitting there’s no reason to keep troops in Iraq for four, much less 100 years–then that could help the tide turn decisively in the presidential election.

Jay Cost of RealClearPolitics has another of his battleground state analyses up today, this time on Virginia.
This history of the Commonwealth in presidential elections is well-known: no Democrat has carried it since LBJ in 1964. But Democrats have won the last three seriously contested non-presidential statewide elections, the 2001 and 2005 gubernatorial races, and the 2006 Senate race. Putting aside Mark Warner’s highly unconventional voter coalition in 2001, Kaine and Webb won with big margins in increasingly Democratic and voter-heavy NoVa, and smaller wins in Hampton Roads and the Richmond area.
Cost thinks Obama might have trouble duplicating Webb’s Hampton Roads performance (Webb, like McCain, had a strong natural pull among military personnel and veterans) and Kaine’s Richmond margins (Kaine was a former mayor of that city), but his potential equalizer could be increased African-American turnout. Obama would also need to do no worse than Kaine and Webb among white voters in Southside, Piedmont and Appalachian Virginia (Obama actually didn’t do that badly in the first two “downstate” regions during the primary). Cost suggests that raising the African-American share of total turnout from 20% to 25% would give Obama a good chance of victory.
I personally think that Obama might do better than Webb or Kaine in NoVa. And Cost doesn’t mention a second Obama ace-in-the-hole when it comes to black voters here and elsewhere: the likelihood that he will improve on John Kerry’s percentage of that vote. By my back-of-the-envelope calculation, if Obama can increase the Democratic percentage of the African-American vote in VA from Kerry’s 87% to 92%–a pretty good bet–that could produce a swing of up to 100,000 votes in the state without a significant increase in relative turnout. Since Bush’s margin in VA in 2004 was 262,000, African-American swing voters, here as in other battleground states with sizable black voting populations, are an X-factor that nobody much has been talking about.
More obviously, if Obama text-messages Tim Kaine’s (or far less likely, Mark Warner’s) name out today or tomorrow as his running-mate, that would almost certainly be worth a percentage point or two in VA, making it less of a reach for Democrats than Cost’s analysis suggests.

If you want to know why the Obama campaign has spent so much time and energy dealing with the convention appearances of Bill and Hillary Clinton, or why, months after the entire hep political world decided it was a terrible idea, there’s renewed speculation that the Unity Ticket could actually happen later today, look no further than the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal general election poll. It showed that among self-described Hillary Clinton supporters, 52% say they now support Obama, while 21% support McCain and 27% are undecided.
What makes this finding especially interesting is how “Clinton supporters” are identified in the poll: those who said they’d “like to see Hillary Clinton become president someday.” This definition probably excludes a significant number of voters who pulled the lever for HRC in the primaries more because of concerns about Obama than affection for Clinton–i.e., nominal Democrats likely to wind up in the GOP column in November. That Obama’s only pulling half of this narrower, more-likely-to-vote-Democratic category of HRC supporters is troubling.
It remains true that as Election Day approaches, most partisan voters and partisan-leaners will feel a lot of pressure to return to the party fold; one of the most obvious factors underlying McCain’s recent mini-surge in the national polls is that GOPers are solidifying support for him more thoroughly and rapidly than Democrats are uniting behind Obama. And overt support for Obama from HRC and her husband won’t automatically convert her admirers. But it’s a big, important target for Obama going into convention week, and well worth whatever effort he gives it, despite the continuing disdain his campaign and many of his supporters feel towards the Clintons.

With, praise Jehovah, the veep speculation on the Democratic side finally about to end, thought I should give a shout-out to at least one blogger who has been evaluating the field not in terms of electoral heft, “theories of change,” or any of the other political factors, but in terms of an often-ignored policy optic. The Progressive Policy Institute’s Katie Campbell, whose new blog, movingupusa.org, focuses on “upward mobility” agendas for low-income Americans, has done profiles of Evan Bayh, Joe Biden, Tim Kaine, Kathleen Sebelius and Bill Richardson, based on what they’ve done and proposed for low-income families.
Campbell’s analysis is particularly valuable in terms of Kaine and Sebelius, whose state-based records aren’t as familiar as those of their Washington counterparts. Check it out.

The big buzz in Democratic circles today, even eclipsing veep speculation, is about the precise amount of damage John McCain might have done himself yesterday in admitting he didn’t know how many houses he owned.
At a time when an awful lot of Americans are losing, or afraid of losing, their one home, this wasn’t a terribly felicitous remark, particularly from a candidate whose age and focus have occasionally been questioned. And Barack Obama wasted no time leaping on the gaffe, suggesting it showed that McCain was generally out of touch with the economic woes of middle-class families. It is, in fact, reminiscent of the iconic moment in the 1992 campaign when George H.W. Bush expressed amazement at his discovery of grocery-store scanners.
Team McCain has fired back the only way it knows how, by making an immediate reference to McCain’s POW experience: “This is a guy who lived in one house for five and a half years — in prison.”
The timing of the gaffe is unfortunate for McCain, since the Democratic gathering in Denver will offer lots of opportunities for speakers to mock the Republican candidate’s wealth and self-ignorance. But expect convention message-managers to take care that they don’t overdo it. Just prior to the 1992 convention, Vice President Dan Quayle delighted late-night comics by stubbornly insisting that the starchy tuber from which french fries are made was spelled “potatoe.” On the second day of the Democratic festival in New York, word came down from the high command to the speech and rehearsal staff: “No more potato jokes.” Even the most powerful gaffe sometimes needs to be allowed to sink in naturally.