The Democratic Party, facing the choice of attacking John McCain or promoting Barack Obama, picked warmth and good feeling over political combat Monday night.
The night’s emotional highlights met the evening’s objective: to introduce Obama as a loving family man, and a leader of sound values and deep convictions.
Michelle Obama, in an eloquent prime-time address that revealed her own political skills, gave a warm, fond description of the candidate as husband, father and public servant whose journey, along with hers, shows the enduring power of the American dream.
And with full hearts, delegates hailed the ailing Sen. Edward M. Kennedy and President John F. Kennedy’s daughter, Caroline, as part of a tribute — and perhaps a farewell — to the last surviving Kennedy brother.
Yet away from prime time, others pummeled McCain — a sign that the Republican standard-bearer will not get the kid-glove treatment this week that the Democrats gave President Bush four years ago in Boston.
A dual-fanged approach was necessary because of the perception, among Democratic leaders and strategists, that McCain has seized the momentum in the past month.
“After a contrived and largely unanswered negative campaign on the part of McCain, the race is a statistical dead heat,” warned Democratic pollster Celinda Lake last week, analyzing the results of the bipartisan Battleground Poll she conducts. “The central challenge for Obama is to start defining the choice in this race on his terms, and putting McCain on defense.”
Democratic Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois, the campaign co-chair, said Obama recognizes that McCain has outplayed him recently.
Obama “loves basketball, you know . . . and we talked about the game today. We realize that over the last week to 10 days, John McCain has had a 12-and-0 run,” said Durbin. Democrats like Durbin recall how Sen. John Kerry’s advisers chose to promote his Vietnam War record at the 2004 convention instead of attacking President Bush.
“That was emblematic of the campaign not being critical enough early enough. Myself, I would’ve had that be about the Iraq war and not the Vietnam war,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi this weekend, recalling the 2004 convention.
So Monday night, Pelosi got the crowd chanting that McCain’s policies are “Wrong!” NARAL president Nancy Keenan said McCain would appoint Supreme Court justices to overrule Roe vs. Wade.
“Unlike the senator from Arizona, my family doesn’t have a private jet,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota.
But for the Obama campaign, it’s not so simple as attack, attack.
The campaign still feels the need to introduce Obama to the voters and for him to tell Americans where he intends to lead them.
“Primarily the focus is going to be on him, because our strength is who he is — his unique ability to bring the country together, to stop dividing along partisan lines, geographic lines, racial lines,” said Valerie Jarrett, a close friend and adviser to the Obamas.
And as an African-American candidate, Obama may be somewhat circumscribed.
“Barack Obama has the capacity to hit. But he is in the situation where he can’t hit back,” said Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. “He has to keep smiling, because nobody wants an angry African-American in the White House.”
The Obama campaign has shown impressive discipline over the past 18 months, attacking with precision and avoiding the appearance of politics as usual.There are some signs the restraint is paying off. In a series of recent polls, Americans are blaming McCain for running a negative campaign.
The Obama campaign’s strategy, said Jarrett, is based on a leap of faith that “the American people are better than that. They can see through that.”
