Just heard Obama Manager David Plouffe’s view of the world at a groovy TIME magazine event. I’ll post some thoughts on it a bit later. But for now, a quick review of last night’s Hillary speech and a dire prediction about tomorrow’s planned spectacular at Invesco field.
Hillary gave the best speech of her career. It will do Obama some good. The only downside was that it was very generic: a single tap of the word processor key to switch and replace out “Barack Obama” and the speech could have been changed in two seconds to endorse Chris Dodd. There was no explicit praise for Obama’s specific talents and character, just a strong endorsement of the party nominee. Not bad, just not perfect, especially with the Clinton vs. Obama tension talk still very much in the air. We’ll see how the former POTUS does tonight.
I think the normally shrewd Obama campaign has a blind spot about tomorrows big speech at Invesco field. The Pepsi center is the visual “home” of this convention. Having Obama do his big finish in another venue screws up the visual vernacular of the convention. Turn off the sound, and watch the tape. In the end it will look like two different conventions; one visually dominated by Clintons, another by Obama. That is a message of separation, not unity. Also, ask any TV director: staging a TV mega-event outdoors is very tricky. Lots of things are hard to control. The whole Obama speaks to massive crowd thing is impressive, but done. We’ve seen it before. Finally, the Mount Olympus set looks problematical at best. An Obama staffer assured me it’ll look better tomorrow. For their sake, it better. They should have changed this up yesterday and moved to a more intimate man in the arena set up back in the Pepsi center. Obama is the nominee, he should own this house. Maybe I’m wrong; but we’ll see how tomorrow night ultimately turns out.