Within the Margin

Coming into Wednesday night, I mentioned to my collaborator, Mr. Matt Clausen, that I had a specific tack in mind for Bill Clinton’s nominating speech. I wanted the Big Dog to give us a little compare and contrast with regard to partisanship. I figured he was equipped with enough of a reputation as bridge-builder that he could ably talk about how Republicans were different when he was president, and to be able to say that Newt Gingrich was a more willing partner than today’s Congressional Republicans.

He didn’t hit on that point specifically – though he did allude to Republican attacks on him in the mid-1990s. But the speech did even more than I had hoped for: it dissected, attack-for-attack, myth-for-myth, misdirection-for-misdirection, the Romney-Ryan case against Obama. It did so in the way that Clinton has become famous for: enough policy to please those of us who know this is actually about governing in the end, and enough folksy charm to keep it accessible and engaging to the widest audience possible. He was dying to give delegates and viewers the tools to present the same message back home in their communities, on the front lines of the campaign. I readily acknowledge my bias, but the contrast between the vagueness of last week’s Republican convention and the point-by-point Clinton onslaught made for a devastating takedown.

But the speech had an impact after the considerable applause gave way to the formality of the delegations casting their votes to renominate President Obama. Bear with my for a moment. You see, we  have all been rained on continuously this week in tropical Charlotte. My clothes were running low, and I wanted to keep it a little less formal today, but I needed to buy some shorts, given that the mix of long drives, Carolina heat and lots of rain earlier in the week had rendered my existing options unwearable. First stop: TJ Maxx. Unsuccessful, but it didn’t feel that way because as I walked in, I came upon workers and customers raving about the Clinton speech – its moxie, its pointed detail. Note that I was in a section of Charlotte’s South Park neighborhood, pretty far from the hotels and quite a distance from Uptown. Next stop: Target, a considerable ways further south and therefore nowhere near any delegates but myself. I walked in…and found another conversation about staff, talking about how Clinton gets it done like few can. Having secured the sought-after apparel, I made my way to Uptown. I scored a burrito from Qdoba, where the young lady on the register sported a Hope button and asked me about the speech. We agreed it was exactly what we needed: a full rebuttal of the bullshit.

It’s a few conversations. But these are all pretty regular folk – not delegates, and not the upscale types inhabiting much of this rather suburban city. I suspect that not all of them voted in 2004. But I’m now certain they’ll be there this November. The question becomes whether it’s amplified in Charlotte because of the convention’s proximity, or if word is traveling with the same joy and fervor elsewhere.