One Direction Home: What the DNC Is All About

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — This convention, for the moment anyway, doesn't march so much as it flows. Last week, with the exception of Clint Eastwood's one-man performance of Plan 9 From Outer Space, the Republicans ran a wonderfully efficient show. There was a speech, then a video about Willard Romney, then a musical interlude, then another speech. One-two-three-four, every night for three nights, and every night with a distinct theme to which the speakers rigidly kept. The problem was that all that precision got in the way of the message. It let some of the party's putative superstars — Chris Christie, Marco Rubio — pretty much bury the lead, which was that everybody was there to nominate Willard Romney for president. They just wound it all up on Tuesday and let it run down by Thursday night. It was a convention without a turning radius. It cornered like a battleship. Eastwood happened because all of that precision put the whole thing on automatic pilot.

Here, on the first night, the music was largely interstitial, there were very few videos, and one speaker followed hard upon the next, all of them with their eyes firmly on the prize, namely that the renomination and re-election of Barack Obama is the one and only duty of everybody who came here. Some of the speakers were good. Governor Deval Patrick went all preachery and sounded very much like who he is, the son of a man who once played music in Sun Ra's Arkestra. And Michelle Obama put one so deep that I don't think it's ever going to be playable, not even Thursday night, when her husband speaks. (The Coming Backlash Previewed: "The Media's In The Tank Again!") Some of the speeches were bad; Maryland governor Martin O'Malley is truly having a terrible week. (Your now customary Wire reference: "Omar don't dance, and Omar don't listen to that speech, either.") But there was a steady course to the evening, and it was all in one direction: The president is worth re-electing because the president has done some things that no Republican would have done.

The most clearly defined example of this was health care, which the Democrats seem determined to reclaim as a genuine achievement, which is something they all resolutely refused to do to at their peril in 2010. The law has been in place long enough now for there to be some authentic human consequences to it, and the Democrats told those stories last night. (This, of course, also wrongfoots Romney, who can't take credit for similar stories in Massachusetts because his party is out of its mind on this issue.) There never has been any reason not to do this, since the Republicans were going to pin it on every Democrat anyway. But now there are Zoe and her mom to bring out on the podium, and Zoe's a pretty good argument.

Of course, there's less of a hard pull here. Nobody has to feel obligated to "introduce" Barack Obama to the nation. There's no great hurry to "humanize" the man. So this convention likely will not have to work quite as hard at establishing a reason that the party should nominate him again as the Republicans had to work to establish a reason why they should nominate Romney at all. And it should put to rest two of the great phony issues of the campaign: 1) that the Democrats had an "enthusiasm gap" in relation to the Republicans, and b) that the Clintons are secretly plotting to undermine the president. As to the first, the "gap" existed solely with that substantial portion of Republicans who are so unhinged at the Kenyan Muslim Usurper that they'd vote for Charlie Manson if he were on the ballot. That's not "enthusiasm." That's fanaticism, and not a little bit of hatred. Besides, I heard the same thing in 2004 from people — like, well, me — who were not enthusiastic about George W. Bush's conduct in office. The Republicans ginned up just enough enthusiasm that fall to make me crazy for another four years. As to the latter, well, I think Bill Clinton's going to burn this place down tomorrow, and he's going to do it on behalf of Barack Obama, who is the only reason all of these people are here. The tide got a little stronger on Tuesday night, and the pull is all in one direction..