Opening night at the Pepsi Center

By CaraBayles on Wed, Aug 27, 2008 12:50 pm

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Speak, Pelosi!Nancy Pelosi spoke like an automaton last night, and in the view from the press gallery, you could see the teleprompter, feeding her line, with most of the sentences beginning, "Barack Obama will…"

The Democratic party belongs to workers. On Sunday, a labor rally filled a ballroom in the convention center with members of the AFL-CIO, the NEA, and other major players, all under the umbrella of the change to win coalition. At the convention Monday night, a machinist with Amtrack talked about his photo shoot with Obama. According to Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Missouri, the "real America" is composed of "waitresses, small businessmen, single moms and truck drivers.

The Democratic party was built by the working class and unions, but this year, it is especially important this year, when accusations that Barack Obama is elitist and Paris Hiltonesque could turn off the working class, particularly the "Reagan Democrats," many of whom went for Clinton in the primaries. The AFL-CIO, a huge national union with a membership of 2.5 million, 84 percent make less than $60,000 a year, 63 percent don't have a college degree, 78 percent are white and 62 percent don't have strong party affiliations.

The DNC is pageantry, just as the RNC is pageantry and the protests are pageantry. But when do the parties get around to self-reflection, to admitting their own imperfections?

The Pepsi Center buzzed. Maybe it was the excitement of the first night, but there seemed to be a constant hum of several thousand conversations, but it stopped dead silent for Sen. Ted Kennedy and Michelle Obama.

Teddy!During the heart-tugging Kennedy tribute video, showing the senator's history of fighting for healthcare, stem cell research, service programs, his own volunteerism, armored humvees in Iraq, intercut with random shots of him on a boat (their relevance explained only by Vicki Ken saying the sea "is the most renewing, healing place for him"). But the breadth of his career and the fact that he showed up, when his ability to fly to Denver so soon after brain cancer treatment was debated, earned him a standing ovation, especially when he promised "I pledge to you, I will be there next January on the floor of the United States Senate when we begin the great test." Shouts of "KEN-ED-Y!" gave way to "TED-DY! TED-DY!" which was clearly easier to chant.

Michelle Obama's speech underscored her working class roots, but not in the tired list form of McCaskill's "waitresses, small business owners and truck drivers."

Plus, she can deliver a poetic turn of phrase without sounding pretentious: "Men and women gathered in churches and union halls and high school gyms. People who stood up and marched and risked everything they had, refusing to settle, determined to mold our future into the shape of our ideals."

And the Obama kids? Adorable. Grabbing the microphone for a little impromptu stage stealing was kind of a perfect way to show that they're real kids, and not some props for the Obama family photos.