Day 3 Impressions

So I did my liveblogging at Calitics and at some point I stopped cross-posting over here, so I thought I'd just wrap it up. I thought Clinton delivered the consummate professional speech, and he attacked not just Bush and McCain, but Republicans, and their failures. The line about how everything started going bad once they took control of Congress and the Presidency in 2001 was first-rate. We need more speakers and surrogates to de-value Republicanism and conservatism.

I thought John Kerry delivered the speech of the convention, and Josh Marshall agrees. In one of those "only at the DNC" moments, after the night was over I ran into Chris Hayes of The Nation, and told him that I thought John Kerry gave the best speech of the night, and the guy next to him said "I wrote it."

It really was tremendous, and I was saddened to hear that the cable nets didn't show it. Kerry had the moral authority to call out McCain for his flip-flopping ("using before it before he was against it" was great) and his dirty campaign tactics (specifically saying that lobbyists and Rove acolytes run his campaign), and he delivered that speech about as well as he possibly could. "Next stop, Baghdad" kind of got lost in the room, because he stepped on an applause line to say it, but it was awesome that he brought up McCain's bloodthirsty-ness to invade Iraq right after 9/11. He kicked off the Bush/McCain Freudian slips of the night, too.

Joe Biden delivered his speech well, but I don't think it was all that well-written. The call-and-response of "that's the change we need" or "that's not the change we need" doesn't flow off the tongue. I understand that Biden wanted to define change a little bit, but on domestic policy it didn't quite work. Kerry's "who do you trust" call and response was much better. On foreign policy, I did appreciate that Biden ripped some things that should have been in the headlines and showed the collapse of the Bush foreign policy and McCain's treading down the same path. The personal story of Biden in the speech was gripping, and his son Beau was excellent.

Overall, this was quite a good night for the party. And Barack Obama coming out at the end put everyone over the top. He pre-butted the Republican hissy fit about using Invesco Field for the acceptance speech, not that it'll matter.

more in a bit...