Can Joe Biden salvage the DNC?

With the important exception of Barack Obama's brilliant speech, the Democrats blew it on Wednesday night. Viewers of the third night of the Democratic National Convention were treated to a video about gun control that could have been produced a year ago, long before the current sharp spike in violent crime across the country. Another spot on climate change looked and sounded like part an ad campaign thrown together for an energy company shortly after an oil spill. As for the speeches, all but Obama's fell flat. Most prominently, Hillary Clinton delivered a message that would have been more politically effective recited by just about anyone else, while Kamala Harris gave a pedestrian, disjointed speech in a tone of phony overacting.

More generally, everything on Wednesday night was suffused with the heavy-handed appeals to identity politics that thrill young party activists but leave almost everyone else cold or feeling alienated. If the idea was to treat the evening as a pep rally to rev up factionalized Democratic interest groups, then maybe it should be judged a success. But if the goal was to reach out to as many Americans as possible with a coherent and consistent message about why they should throw in with the Democratic Party in November, then Night 3 was mostly a dud.

That leaves Night 4 — and above all Joe Biden's speech — to bring the convention back on track. Remarks earlier in the evening by Sen. Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Tammy Duckworth, Andrew Yang, and Michael Bloomberg might do more than Wednesday night's speakers to paint an appealing picture of the Democratic Party. But it is Biden's speech that will set the tone for the general election campaign to come. Will it convincingly invite all Americans to join in a quest to unseat Donald Trump and move the country in a dramatically new direction? What will the new direction look like? How far will it track to the left or hew to the center? If Biden can answer these questions in a compelling way, he will have succeeded in erasing the bad memories of Wednesday night and bringing the convention to a successful close.

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