Barack Obama's acceptance of his party's presidential nomination next week will be a crucial test for the Illinois senator in a rapidly tightening race, writes Denis Stauntonin Washington
WHEN BARACK Obama accepts the Democratic presidential nomination before almost 80,000 people in a football stadium in Denver next Thursday, the event will not only be heavy with historical resonances but will round off a week that could determine the outcome of November's election.
The first African-American to win the nomination of a major party, Obama will make his acceptance speech on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech and the open-air setting is a deliberate reminder of John F Kennedy's nomination in Los Angeles in 1960.
With the presidential nominees already known and the party platforms agreed, this year's back-to-back Democratic and Republican conventions promise no floor fights over candidates or policy. But Michael Feldman, who was Al Gore's chief of staff in the 2000 campaign, believes the next two weeks could still be the most important between now and the election on November 4th.
"The fact is, there are very few real impact moments in a presidential campaign, ones where for the most part the campaign completely controls the conversation and the convention, particularly the acceptance speech, is really one of those moments," he says.
"It may not be as consequential in deciding the outcome of a nomination but it is consequential in terms of the communications platform or as a vehicle for communicating the campaign's message and highlighting the candidate's biography."
Although Obama has written two autobiographies and has dominated the political news for almost two years, his life story remains obscure to many Americans and next week's convention aims to fill in the dots of his personal narrative. It will open with a speech by his wife Michelle and include testimonials from other family members and friends as well as a biopic that will seek to place the candidate firmly within the American middle class.
"The biographical elements of it are particularly important for Senator Obama because he is the newer brand," says Feldman. "He is the element that the country is for the most part still unfamiliar with. So hearing from his family, seeing various other figures in the Democratic Party validate him as a president and commander-in-chief and then hearing from him himself on Thursday night are all elements that go into filling out that biography for a lot of Americans who have heard his name and have seen bits and pieces of him but the window is open now for communication from the senator himself."
Next week's convention comes as the presidential race has narrowed dramatically, with Obama's lead evaporating over the summer to the point where one major poll this week showed Republican John McCain five points ahead. Democrats who were once confident of victory in November, some even predicting a landslide win for Obama, now fear that the first-term Illinois senator may be unable to close the deal with the American people.
Obama's tour of the Middle East and Europe, including a rally before 200,000 cheering fans in Berlin, gave him a brief bounce in the polls, but McCain's attacks, notably his comparison of the Democrat to celebrities Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, have had a powerful impact. The narrowing of the race reflects a fall in support for Obama across almost every demographic group and diminishing enthusiasm for the candidate among younger voters.
"I don't think you can deny that McCain has closed the gap and it's clear that the race is much tighter than I think the Obama campaign would want it to be," says Joe Trippi, who ran John Edwards's campaign this year and Howard Dean's in 2004.
"So I think in a lot of ways it's more important for the Obama campaign to have a good convention. I mean, they had this lead but it's become almost a dead heat now. If they come out the other side of this convention and they don't get a bump - precisely because the Republicans are running theirs within days - that could be a problem for Obama."
The decision to stage Obama's acceptance speech in a football stadium rather than in the convention centre reflects his campaign's success at drawing huge crowds as well as the candidate's unusual gifts as a public speaker.
"I'm sure in hindsight it will either be brilliant or idiotic. As a campaign strategy, as a tactic, as a potentially more interesting venue to highlight this particular candidate's strengths, it makes a lot of sense. This campaign is all about enthusiasm and excitement and certainly having 80,000 people in an open stadium like that will do that," says Feldman.
THE PLAN FOR a mass nomination rally has left Obama open to charges of hubris, however, and Trippi believes the Republicans have already prepared their response in an effort to downplay its impact. "The McCain campaign has been trying to say: 'Okay, he's a celebrity - but so what? We have real problems'," he says.
"So is that crowd of people and Barack Obama going to come off here as a way for the McCain people to say: 'see, it's exactly what we've been saying - he can speak in front of big crowds, he's a celebrity, but we're dealing with the real stuff here'? Or does that event come off in a way that the entire country looks at it and watching him at that moment decides that he should be the president? Both of those things are capable of happening."
One of the most unpredictable elements in an otherwise carefully scripted week of events could be the role of Bill and Hillary Clinton, who will play a major part in three of the four nights of the convention. Hillary Clinton will deliver a speech about economic issues on Tuesday, her husband will speak on Wednesday, just ahead of the vice-presidential nominee and on Thursday, the former first lady's name will go forward for nomination along with Obama's.
"Senator Clinton ran an historic campaign and she has a great deal of support and admiration in the party, as obviously does her husband as a former president. I think their role at the convention is to leverage that support and to hand off that support and that intensity of support to those people who haven't made the move yet over to Senator Obama," says Feldman.
THE DECISION TO allow a roll call vote on the nomination is an attempt to appease Clinton's supporters, many of whom remain angry at the way the media treated her during the campaign and some of whom are planning noisy protests in Denver. In an unusual move, Clinton has put together a 40-person whip team to deflect any anti-Obama protests by her supporters on the floor.
"If people get down there on the floor and want to start blowing kazoos and making a scene, we want to make sure we've got people who stand in front of them with Obama signs," one of the whips said this week. "Is it typical for a losing candidate to have their own whip team? No. But it's also not usual for a losing candidate to get 18 million votes either."
This year's conventions are not only taking place much later in the campaign than usual but are back-to-back, with the Republicans meeting in St Paul the following Monday. Conventions traditionally give candidates a poll bounce of up to 10 points, with the party that meets earlier usually winning the biggest boost. This year, however, McCain plans to step on Obama's momentum immediately by announcing his vice-presidential running mate next Friday and spending the following week celebrating his own qualities and hammering his opponent.
Trippi believes that the closeness of the conventions could either diminish the poll bounce each candidate receives or accelerate it. "If one of these parties excels in their convention and wows people and the other is choreographed and doesn't really answer the questions, because they're so close to each other the contrast is going to be pretty clear. That might actually make a post-convention bump even stronger. Both of these conventions are likely to be geared at change and what that means for Obama is explaining that change to the American people, showing it to them in a way that they understand and that's not scary. It's not change they have to be afraid of."