Courting Joe Six-Pack in Denver

With his once-comfortable lead in the polls gone, Barack Obama sought to convey a simple message at the Democratic National Convention in Denver this week: that working-class Americans could feel comfortable voting for him as president. That theme was the centerpiece of an emotional tribute by his wife, Michelle, who stressed her husband’s humble roots, his faith in hard work, and her own family’s middle-class struggles. The Week went to press before Obama’s scheduled Thursday address, but the nominee was expected to emphasize that he would devote his presidency to Americans facing job losses and to economic insecurity. Just before the convention, Obama picked Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware as his running mate, partly because of his ability to speak to blue-collar voters.

Obama’s central message, though, was muddied by a melodramatic back story—the continued friction between his camp and that of Hillary and Bill Clinton. In a much-anticipated speech, Hillary Clinton urged her frustrated supporters to back Obama, saying, “The time is now to unite as a single party with a single purpose.” Some critics, though, said that her endorsement of Obama, while impeccable on the surface, clearly did not come from the heart. Bill Clinton, meanwhile, was said to be still fuming over the blows he took during the campaign, and aides said he resisted Obama’s efforts to exert some control over his Wednesday night speech.

What the editorials said

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Despite Obama’s best-laid plans, “the party’s genetic coding for self-destruction was taking over,” said the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. A Gallup poll released before the convention said that fewer than half of Hillary Clinton’s supporters were committed to Obama, while 30 percent said they’d vote for Republican John McCain or sit out the election. “Nothing could make the Republicans happier” than this schism, said The Boston Globe. If Democrats are going to win, Obama had better find a way to win over the older women and working-class voters who thought she was the better candidate.

True, the Clintons are a distraction, said The Washington Post, but the focus on Democratic infighting obscures “the potential value of the Clinton legacy to an Obama campaign and presidency.” President Clinton understood that “America’s future prosperity depends on a deepening economic and commercial engagement with the world.” He encouraged the U.S. to get out there and compete. “That legacy of his presidency should be built upon.”

What the columnists said

Conventions always provide something “gratifyingly weird,” said Maureen Dowd in The New York Times. When I asked former McCain guru Mike Murphy to define the odd feeling in the air in Denver, he replied: “submerged hate.” It’s clear that the grievances of the primary season haven’t subsided and that Hillary is “straining at the bit to announce her 2012 exploratory committee.” The whole subtext of her carefully crafted convention speech—with its pungent attacks on McCain—was to convince Democrats that they’ve got “the wrong nominee or that Obama had chosen the wrong running mate.”

The Democrats did choose the wrong nominee, said Philip Klein in The American Spectator. A freshman senator with no accomplishments of any significance, Obama makes liberal audiences “swoon” with his vows to transcend politics and race. But pretty rhetoric—and a résumé featuring a job as a community organizer in Chicago—doesn’t impress hardworking Americans worried about terrorism and struggling to make ends meet.

To win over these traditional Democrats, said Harold Meyerson in The Washington Post, Obama has an excruciatingly difficult task. Working-class voters are angry, blaming “elites of both parties for their woes.” They want a champion, but find it hard to identify with a black guy. Somehow, Obama must tap into working-class anger “without looking like an angry black man.”

What next?

Despite advice pouring in from worried Democratic strategists, Obama’s Chicago brain trust will continue to chart its own course in the months ahead. Some Democrats say Obama should focus more on specifics, while others insist he must meet McCain’s negative attacks with a flurry of his own. But Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, and campaign manager, David Plouffe, believe he’s a unique candidate who must run a unique campaign, said Ben Smith in Politico.com. “Obama’s primary victory left his aides confident that they will succeed where their predecessors failed.”