The Convention Blog

Hillary Clinton was the star of the show at Tuesday’s DNC. People get the obvious part that she wasn’t Ted Kennedy in 1980, that is to say that she tried to unite the party instead of dividing it. She also did a nice job of stressing the contrasts between the Dems and Repubs as the Democrats see it. The entire evening was very effective in doing this because it hit McCain at a weak point (the economy), addressed one of the topics that the Democrats needed to deal with (energy policy) and drew a contrast between the party of the future (D’s) versus the party of the past (R’s). These are the kinds of contrasts that Republicans have successfully drawn for years in order to differentiate themselves from the Democrats. Deval Patrick was very good and did exactly what the Obama people probably wanted him to do. Talk about where he (and more recently) Obama was from and link that to the cultural idea of the American dream. Too bad for him he spoke too near to Governor Brian Schweitzer (MT) for anyone outside Massachusetts to remember him. The students, all of whom have had hall passes, and I, watching the DNC live feed elsewhere, have been able to piece together an understanding of what the differences are between the two. Several of the things that I thought worked really well were total flops inside the Hall. So, as with a lot else in American politics, the key things are fitting the message to the medium employed and figuring out what audience you are trying to hit then making the proper adjustments. The students are working long hours at their various jobs and all of them seem to be learning a great deal about how the institutions in which they are working function in pressure situations. The other big thing that was reiterated again yesterday was that, for the Obama Campaign, the whole election is probably going to come down to youth participation rates. We were briefed by the Rock the Vote group yesterday and they had data that indicated that youth voting was way up and that this was a direct product of the numerous registration drives launched by the various progressive groups. They used an interesting metaphore for their work: pushing people to vote for a candidate like Obama is akin to the one indie rock band that leads young people into the entire genre. The idea being that if they like one product, they will like others and purchase them regularly. So, the whole bet is that young people will turn out and start to vote regularly for Democrats. The Republicans did something like this in the 1980’s but it didn’t seem to be their core audience as it does seem to be in the Obama case and this is why this is such a high stakes bet. If Republicans in the 1980’s didn’t get a huge youth turnout it mattered slightly, if Obama doesn’t, he probably loses the election.

The other interesting thing was that I saw Michelle Obama’s motorcade leaving her hotel the other night. It is interesting seeing again how much more security presidential candidates and presidents get than does anyone else at the federal level. One has to wonder if people really understand what they’re signing up for when the run for this office and, more interestingly, what they think of once they get into that little bubble in which presidents live.