Seeking unity, Obama confronts divergent audiences
Convention faces shifting challenges
DENVER - On Friday evening, a stagehand applied the final coat of polyurethane onto the dark wood-grain veneer that runs around the base of the Democrats' convention stage at the Pepsi Center. Above it stands a high-tech set with glowing red and blue stairs, an electronic screen with a scrolling text ticker, and a backdrop alternating stylized images of a skyline and mountain range.
From a podium in the middle - and from another on Thursday evening at a nearby football stadium, with a backdrop of real mountains - the Democratic Party and its newly christened ticket will try to win over three distinct audiences. As their message moves outward from the stage over the next four evenings, it will face different, and at times conflicting, challenges.
Inside the convention hall will be thousands of delegates and party activists, nearly half of whom probably supported someone other than Barack Obama in the primaries. Beyond lies a state and region that Republicans have dominated in recent presidential races, but where Democrats believe this year's message of hopeful change could lead to long-term gains. And via prime-time television, a national audience including millions of undecided and independent-minded voters will receive their first extended exposure to Obama.
"The convention is a real opportunity to reintroduce Barack Obama to the American people," said David Wilhelm, who chaired the Democratic National Committee during its 1996 convention. "I don't buy that there's been a lack of specificity on his part, but the convention's a great opportunity to specify and refine things and make the stakes absolutely clear."
Obama's long path to his party's nomination began four years ago on a similar, if less flashy, stage in Boston where he delivered a keynote address that eschewed ideas of dividing the electorate along party lines. Yet at a moment where polls show that voters have more confidence in Democrats generically than in their new standard-bearer, the party will have to decide whether to use its convention week to exploit a current partisan advantage or to pitch its nominee as a transcendent figure who can rise above the polarization of recent decades.
"Are you going to present this guy who can govern across the middle, or is he the guy who's going to modernize, reform and bring up to date traditional Democratic values?" said Byron E. Shafer, a University of Wisconsin political scientist who has written widely on the role of conventions. "He's got to define himself, because one of the jobs of the Republican convention is to define Barack Obama."
One convention priority, according to strategists, will be to recast Obama's life story to serve as a rejoinder to rumors about his patriotism and religion that have preyed on his exotic origins. Those worldly immigrant roots figured prominently in his 2004 speech, but many Democrats say that this year he should put greater emphasis on biographical elements that highlight elements of middle-class, all-Americanness. On Friday, the convention-hall band could be heard rehearsing "Born in the USA" as the walk-on music for Obama's half-sister Maya Soetoro-Ng, who is half-Indonesian and lives in Hawaii.
Four years ago, Democrats focused mostly on the virtues of their nominee, John F. Kerry, particularly his background as a combat veteran, and little on the weaknesses of his opponent, George W. Bush. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters on Saturday that she wished the 2004 convention had been more "about the Iraq war, not the Vietnam war" and that this year the party would be more forceful in using its week to drawing distinctions with the opposition.
"There isn't an area of public policy that this administration has not failed in, and the country can not take four more years of it," Pelosi said. "That point will be made over and over again. There are two paths to the future: One is more of the same, the other is the path that Barack Obama represents."
A weeklong fiercely partisan pep rally in Denver focused on the ideological differences between the two parties could help Obama win over backers of Hillary Clinton, party leaders said. Many of Clinton's backers identify with traditional liberal issues.
"If he can't get that arena, he'll have a difficult time getting elected," said Gordon Fischer, a former chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party.
Yet the ideological appeals that could help win over Clinton loyalists active within the party could fall flat with some of the white, working-class voters they represent, part of a standard swing bloc that does not necessarily identify with the Democratic Party.
"The elites and the mass public can be on a different wavelength," said Shafer. "There's a real disconnect between what's left of the Hillary people in the hall and the Hillary people out in the country."
The only thing those two groups have in common is personal confidence in Clinton, one of several prime-time validators - including his new running mate, Delaware Senator Joe Biden - Obama has enlisted to vouch for him to skeptics.
"She is fully behind the Obama campaign and now her followers need to follow her," Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico said of Clinton. "It's always tougher to drag your staff and your supporters because they've been emotionally thrown so much. It's going to take a rousing speech."
Democratic leaders, including chairman Howard Dean, said that they hope to use Denver as a unique perch to reach traditionally Republican Western states targeted by the Obama campaign, including Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Montana, where such issues as energy and the environment have dominated the agenda.
"To some extent, voters in these states are electing people with that bipartisan approach and pragmatic problem-solving," said Rebecca Lamb, a Las Vegas-based strategist affiliated with Senate majority leader Harry Reid. "Will it hurt the Democrats to be partisan? No. But Barack Obama has had a different way of doing politics, and I think that will continue."
Obama's campaign hopes to take advantage of the locale by moving his acceptance speech to Invesco Field, able to hold 75,000 spectators. Many of the seats have been distributed to the public, allowing the campaign to accumulate data on local supporters in a way that can help efforts to mobilize them by Election Day.
"It's much more grass roots," said Fischer. "It's like a political convention with this dash of community organizing thrown in." 