Our Man On The Floor: The Teddy And Michelle Show

From Nathan Stormer:

Michelle’s speech was all in all pretty fluffy but it countered the McCain nonsense about a reckless elitist about as much as any ad ever could.   Extremely humanizing.

Along with Teddy coming back to roar, the family moment with the Obama’s was actually great.  David Brooks just burped up a stupid criticism that Michelle did not normalize Obama enough because America sees him as a messiah.  Hogwash.  That is the best he could do?

Until Kennedy, I thought the massive spectical emphasized the hollow procedure of a convention, missing all the passion and commitment.  But Teddy made the set go away and brought it to the human level it needed to be at.

From Dalia Lithwick/Slate:

What I loved best about Michelle Obama’s speech tonight was that it was fearless, but in a very different way from the fearlessness modeled by Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi. Here is a woman with a degree from Harvard Law School, who could have talked about law and policy and poverty, and yet she talked about her kids, her husband, and her family. And she didn’t do that merely to show us that smart women are soft and cuddly on the inside. She did what everyone else in this campaign is terrified to do: She risked looking sappy and credulous and optimistic when almost everyone has abandoned “hope” and “change” for coughing up hairballs of outrage.  (More.)

From Alan Chin …

What the presentation tonight showed is blue state America, at least the urban, educated wing of the Democratic alliance.  There wasn’t a lot of press on this, but the show tonight — including Michelle’s sister and brother — showed the party as multi-state, multi-region, multi-ethnic, muti-race, multi-everything.  It was the real America.  This campaign goes beyond a discussion of race, as fixated on by the mostly white media.

If there is one useful thing this convention does is show that.  Of course, the right wing will hate this.  They will probably say that the Obama children were exploited for talking to their Dad when Obama said they wouldn’t be used in the campaign.  But what Monday night showed what nice, educated people sitting around having fun, in this case, talking to each other using Skype.  The right wing will hate this because it wasn’t about paranoid fear and loathing.  It wasn’t about hate or the bible.  It was about normal America.

(All images © Alan Chin.  Denver. 2008)