The Convention Floor

The utter madhouse of the convention floor is a heady atmosphere. You are buffeted by the pulse of the crowd, you feel a thousand conversations crawling over your ears. The convention invades you.

Like everywhere else in Denver, the floor is plastered with Obama. The walls and the halls and even the actual floor. The crowd dances when there is a break, to music clanking between the sound system and the resounding echoes. When someone speaks, the signs are waved wildly, and people strain to exude their support, as if projecting their buttons and logos into the world's consciousness by force of will alone.

I squeezed in through the press of, well, press, at the end of Ted Kennedy's speech. You could taste the mood. I don't think worshipful would be too strong. As I entered, just off to my left Joe Biden left his seat and exited the back of his box. I didn't see him return during the next three speakers' time on stage.

It was into this atmosphere that Michelle Obama eventually delivered her speech. Because of Kennedy, it was not the most important speech of the evening, nor will it be the most remembered. It was, though, the capstone of the evening.

Like the rest of the stage this evening, Michelle brought up community service and community organizing repeatedly and at length. The intent in this repetition is clear: establish Senator Obama's community organizer years as the experience he is so often accused of lacking. More than that, actually, it is to establish such experience as critical to his mission in the White House, essential to what America needs. Not merely experience ... essential, vital experience.

Michelle addressed some of her own issues which have proved weak points for the campaign. She said she owed America so much for all it had done for her, instead of saying America is mean and unworthy of pride. She hammered the dual points that they were diverse and with an improbable journey to reach where they are, and also that they are just a regular old family in America, just like everyone else. The idea was that they are both totally normal, and yet brilliantly exceptional.

She touched on typical liberal themes, of course. The world is not beautiful, but Barack wants us to make it beautiful. She lavishly heaped praise on Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. She spoke of military families who are missing those they love. She speaks loftily of the young across the country serving the least of these. She builds an image of long-suffering Americans, who are at long last due a break. Standard Democrat rhetoric, complete with standard flourishes and gestures.

She also echoed her husband's tone of the prophet, claiming that this was where the "current of history meets this new tide of hope," evoking Barack's St. Paul victory reverie: "this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." Barack knows what you need, she claimed, and what's more, you shall have it.

Michelle Obama had the stage with a crowd already swooning from a Democrat high. She came on stage with a presence, beautiful and commanding. And with her moment, she opted to deliver a speech peppered with platitudes and littered with wooden gestures and forced flourishes. A speech which leaped from talking point to damage control and back again. A speech which fell far short of its moment. In the end, Michelle's message was no different than that of the entire campaign so far: Barack Obama is the one, he has come to save you. Rejoice.

And in the stadium, rejoice they did. So ends day one of the convention.