Democrats Aim For United Front At Convention

Media General News Service
Published: August 25, 2008

DENVER - After a long and contentious presidential primary season in which Florida played a central role, Democrats hold their national convention this week with the aim of projecting strength and unity behind the first black presidential nominee of a major party.

The events in Denver come as Barack Obama and Democrats have a real chance to seize the White House after eight years of Republican control, and as voters struggle with rising prices, a teetering economy and war fatigue.

Running from Monday through Thursday at a cost of about $100 million, the convention will be a sort of nightly televised serial watched by as many as 20 million people. It comes a week before Republicans gather in St. Paul, Minn., to nominate John McCain as their standard-bearer.

The convention will culminate with Obama’s coronation Thursday as the party’s nominee, 45 years to the day after Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of his dream.

Obama will deliver his historic acceptance speech before a national TV audience from an outdoor football stadium where more than 75,000 seats are expected to be filled. Convention events earlier in the week take place in a basketball and hockey arena. In 1960, Sen. John F. Kennedy had similarly moved his acceptance speech to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.

More than anything, the Denver convention represents four days in which Obama and his campaign will have a chance to tightly control their message, just as Republicans will have the chance to do in Minnesota.

They will also seek to heal any lingering divisions between Obama’s supporters and those of his chief primary rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton, while addressing what pollsters say is an ongoing lack of voter familiarity, or even discomfort, with Obama, 47.

“At the end of the week, the convention will be unified,“ predicted U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, a Florida superdelegate who had been a Clinton supporter.

A Strategy To Play Up Strengths

It is important to Obama for the week to go smoothly. He entered this summer ahead in most national polls over McCain, having overcome early Democratic favorite Clinton to secure the delegates needed for the party’s nomination.

Obama’s poll numbers have been slipping, however, and most national voter surveys show him in a dead heat with McCain.

“The country wants a Democratic president. They are just not sure about this Democrat,“ said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.

Obama has been hurt by McCain ads in key battleground states such as Florida and other efforts depicting the Harvard Law School graduate as aloof or out of touch with the mainstream. There have also been insinuations that his gift of oratory and youthful appeal are more glitter than substance.

Obama has said his exotic name and mixed-race background - he’s the son of a black Kenyan father and white mother from Kansas raised partly in Indonesia - are other challenges he faces as a candidate.

And in recent weeks, Russia’s invasion of Georgia focused more attention on Obama’s rather thin foreign policy and security background, adding to the view by some that he is, perhaps, too young, or too inexperienced.

His choice of Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware as his vice presidential running mate might help counter some of those concerns about youth and inexperience. Biden is chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and is scheduled to address the convention Wednesday night. But Obama also needs to do more to introduce himself to voters, analysts say.

“A lot of people still don’t know much about him,“ said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist (College) Institute for Public Opinion.

On Monday, Obama’s wife, Michelle, will kick off the prime-time speeches with what is expected to be a portrayal of her husband as an all-American-type candidate and family man.

Clinton’s speech will follow Tuesday. And former President Bill Clinton is among the speakers scheduled for Wednesday night, the same night the vice presidential nominee will speak as the convention theme will switch to national security and foreign affairs.

Other speakers during the week include former President Jimmy Carter, Sen. John Kerry, U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, who is running for the Senate this fall.

Tampa freshman Rep. Kathy Castor and Rep. Robert Wexler of Boca Raton are Floridians who will give speeches to the convention.

“It’s not all silly hats. It’s also about meaningful policy,“ Castor said of the convention.

The mission, as she sees it, is to show Americans why change is needed in Washington, and why “Sen. Obama is the best opportunity to change what’s happening in D.C.“ Castor expects to give her speech about 7 p.m. Wednesday, focusing on education issues.

Wexler also will speak Wednesday.

The Clinton Factor

Accomplishing the goal of party unity this week might be made more difficult if Clinton fails to deliver a robust endorsement of her former rival when she addresses the convention Tuesday night, or is viewed as merely going through the motions.

Uncertainty could result within state delegations - such as Florida’s - that pledged more delegates to Clinton than Obama on how to react or behave if she does not offer a full-throated endorsement.

Talk this summer that some Clinton backers could create convention upheaval to protest what they think was a flawed nominating process has diminished with the announcement that Clinton’s name would be placed symbolically in nomination.

Clinton will then likely call on her supporters to cast their votes for Obama instead. Former Clinton staff members are expected to be on the convention floor to make sure her supporters don’t make embarrassing waves.

Florida Democratic Party chairwoman Karen Thurman said she is unaware of much discussion among the state’s delegates “about any of this.“ But she said she thinks about 85 percent of the delegation’s Clinton supporters now support Obama, and she doesn’t expect convention-floor conspiracies.

“I think Hillary has clearly sent the signal, ‘Let’s move on,‘“ Thurman said.

In all, Florida has 211 convention delegates; 52 percent of the pledged delegates originally supported Clinton, and 31 percent supported Obama.

Outside the convention events, most to be held inside the Pepsi Center, police say they are bracing for as many as 30,000 anti-war and other demonstrators.

Convention officials also hope to avoid disruptions and infighting over the Democratic Party platform, a document of official party principles and positions that is not binding to candidates for office. All at the convention will vote on it Monday night.

One step taken to avoid controversy is that Obama will name a committee to consider how and whether to revise the party’s rules for selecting a presidential candidate in 2012.

That includes the scheduling of primaries and caucuses and a rethinking of the role of automatic superdelegates.

That move follows the controversy over the national party’s decision this year to initially bar Florida and Michigan from sending their delegates to this week’s convention because both states held presidential primaries in January, leapfrogging other states, in violation of party rules.

That disenfranchisement prompted anger from Clinton supporters after she received more votes in both states, only to have those votes not be counted by the party toward delegates. (Obama had taken his name off the ballot in Michigan, and neither campaigned in Florida.)

Eventually, party leaders gave delegates from Florida and Michigan half their votes. But that still left many Clinton supporters upset.

It wasn’t until Obama had already sewn up the delegate battle that he called this month for the party to fully restore the delegates from the two states. That is something the convention credentials committee is expected to do officially today.

“Hallelujah!“ Nelson said sarcastically Wednesday upon learning of the special commission Obama will name to consider how to revise the party’s primary rules. He and Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan have filed a bill to create a rotating system of primaries.

The events in Denver will culminate with Obama’s acceptance speech Thursday at INVESCO Field at Mile High.

The goal is to underscore the image of Obama as a fresh young agent of change with broad appeal and intelligence to go along with his speaking skills.

The danger is that it could simply play even more into Team McCain’s ridicule of him as an empty celebrity, more rock-star-like glitz than substance.

“He’s got to engender trust and make a connection with people,“ pollster Brown said. “They have to convince the country it wants this Democrat.“

Reporter Billy House can be reached at (202) 662-7673 or .