In a twist on the normal convention finale, the prominent figures — donors, elected officials and media celebrities like Dan Rather — looked somewhat like the interlopers. Younger people dressed in jeans and shorts — many not of voting age — seemed decidedly more at home, as if they were attending an open-air concert and were fully versed in the festival ritual. The wave broke out in Section 338 just after Mr. Gore’s speech ended and spread quickly around the stadium.

Justin Rockefeller, a youth voting advocate who has attend several conventions with his father, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, told me that this year’s convention was the youngest he’s ever seen. “From my memory it definitely looks younger — not so much on delegate floor, but more so in the hallways and especially outside,” he observed.

But all is not well with the youth vote.

Michael Connery, an analyst of youth engagement and the author of “Youth to Power: How Today’s Young Voters Are Building Tomorrow’s Progressive Majority,” worries that young voters were “seen but not heard” at the DNC:

Turnout among young voters in the Democratic primary was double the level recorded in 2004, and young voters broke heavily in favor of Sen. Obama. In the Iowa caucuses, young voters performed on par with the “reliable” senior vote, and were widely credited with providing Sen. Obama’s margin of victory… Despite this unprecedented youth involvement at the convention, young people were more likely to be seen than heard by the delegates and party officials in Denver….

Most surprisingly, the one place young voters were completely absent at the Democratic National Convention was at the podium. During my four nights at the convention I did not see one young voter or youth organizer – from CDA, YDA, SFBO or otherwise – address the convention. Thursday at Invesco Field was no better. Not one young person took the stage that night.

These are important critiques. It’s odd that Obama’s team did not tout more youth stories and voices during prime time, since he needs to keep his young base energized for turnout.

There was, however, at least one major youth speaker on Thursday night at the stadium. Ray Rivera, 29, a Colorado state director for the Obama campaign, addressed the 80,000 person crowd — twice. He was promoting, naturally, a text message organizing program, which recruited 30,000 new numbers that night alone. There was a big map and everything. I followed up with Connery, but he was not impressed. He emailed from the Republican National Convention:

I don’t count Ray Rivera’s time on the stage. He may be young, but his purpose on stage was not to represent youth at the convention, it was to list build for the campaign. He was not there as an advocate for young people on the many pressing issues we face, and even if he were, one slot in four nights would still be skimpy representation considering what young people have done for Democratic candidates since 2006.

So there. It doesn’t count and even if it did it’s not enough. But that vision is a bit too cramped.

It is good that Obama entrusted his operation in a key state like Colorado to a young operative; just as it was good for Obama to put so much faith in young web organizers who upended U.S. politics with their online strategy, social networking and web fund-raising. Joe Rospars, Sam Graham-Felsen and Chris Hughes, for example, are all 27 or younger.

In many ways, empowering young people without putting them in youth constituency silos is better than just checking the youth box with some official speaker. Rivera had a huge — probably nerve-racking — role on the Big Night to actually do something in his official role, albeit related to the youth vote, rather than just giving a quick talk about how Barack inspires students.

There could have been more young speakers on stage all week — and it will be interesting to see the contrast for Republicans in St. Paul — but the text message addresses were a good start

For a full video breakdown of Obama’s youth edge, here’s a clip of a recent panel I attended on the Youth Vote in 2008.

Obama did not gain any additional support in the poll since his generally well-reviewed acceptance speech on Thursday night.

None. Zip. Zero. Remember, the Democratic National Convention broke several records for overall viewers. Day Two drew five times the ratings of the same day in 2004. Day Four, Obama’s address, shattered convention records, topping ratings for “American Idol,” the most-watched night of the Olympics and the Oscars. (The Oscars!) The speech thrilled delegates and was heralded across the spectrum — including this striking praise from conservative Pat Buchanan. If the story ended there, Obama would have surely netted some increase in the polls.

Before the Mile High Speech sunk in at all, however, the McCain campaign dropped its bombshell news about Gov. Sarah Palin. People were shocked, riveted, excited and disconcerted. They were not thinking about Obama anymore. CNN’s new poll, like Gallup, shows no bounce for Obama. CNN Polling Director Keating Holland explains that there were two bounces — or maybe none:

The convention, and particularly Obama’s speech, seems to be well-received. And the selection of Sarah Palin as the GOP running mate also seems to be well-received. So why is the race still a virtual tie? Probably because the two events created equal and opposite bounces assuming that either one created a bounce at all.

Now, maybe you’d like a slightly more definitive analysis from the person in charge of the poll, but Holland is candidly noting that tracking polls are inexact and the non-bounce is hard to read. If by “opposite bounces,” however, he means that an equal number of supporters of each candidate switched places, that’s the less likely explanation. More likely, the undecideds and soft conservatives — who might have been temporarily swayed by Obama’s big night — stopped in their tracks with the Palin news. That’s discouraging, naturally, for all those people who reflexively assume that Palin is hurting McCain. Take The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan, who emphasizes that undecided voters claim they dislike the pick:

[A]mong the critical undecideds, the Palin pick made only 6 percent more likely to vote for McCain; and it made 31 percent less likely to vote for him. 49 percent said it would have no impact, and 15 percent remained unsure.

So they say. But survey interviews are a “performance of an ideal self,” as the writer Alexander Provin explains so perfectly in a review of pollster John Zogby’s new book. People may not want to admit — to themselves, let alone pollsters — that the running mate affects their vote, or that the simple addition of a woman to the GOP ticket is making them give McCain a second look. Most say the pick is irrelevant (49 percent) or bad (31 percent). Meanwhile, in the aggregate, the same voters appear to be sticking by McCain, defying the usual trends, after Obama’s tremendously successful convention.

On Thursday, the TV audience was 41.9 million people. That’s more than double the audience for Sen. John Kerry’s 2004 acceptance speech. Few commentators predict that this week’s convention address by Sen. John McCain’s address will come close to Obama’s audience. In fact, the Democratic nominee’s audience is still growing.

Over the past three days, more than 870,000 people have watched Obama’s entire convention address on YouTube. That includes about 390,000 through Obama’s official channel, and several hundred thousand more through general interest YouTube accounts from C-SPAN and PoliticsTV.

Today it is the second most viewed video on all of YouTube, sandwiched between a music video by Nelly and a clip of “love secrets.” That’s especially striking because videos have to be watched in full to count for a view. Every other Top 10 video is under nine minutes, while Obama’s is 43 minutes.

Of course, the Obama campaign has repeatedly deployed YouTube to expand its reach without any cost. During the convention, it not only provided an alternative platform for speeches on demand, but also circulated original and “backstage” videos to show YouTubers scenes that even the floor delegates could not see.

To Chairman Dean and my great friend Dick Durbin; and to all my fellow citizens of this great nation;With profound gratitude and great humility, I accept your nomination for the presidency of the United States.

.

Let me express my thanks to the historic slate of candidates who accompanied me on this journey, and especially the one who traveled the farthest – a champion for working Americans and an inspiration to my daughters and to yours — Hillary Rodham Clinton. To President Clinton, who last night made the case for change as only he can make it; to Ted Kennedy, who embodies the spirit of service; and to the next Vice President of the United States, Joe Biden, I thank you. I am grateful to finish this journey with one of the finest statesmen of our time, a man at ease with everyone from world leaders to the conductors on the Amtrak train he still takes home every night.

To the love of my life, our next First Lady, Michelle Obama, and to Sasha and Malia – I love you so much, and I’m so proud of all of you.

Four years ago, I stood before you and told you my story – of the brief union between a young man from Kenya and a young woman from Kansas who weren’t well-off or well-known, but shared a belief that in America, their son could achieve whatever he put his mind to.

It is that promise that has always set this country apart – that through hard work and sacrifice, each of us can pursue our individual dreams but still come together as one American family, to ensure that the next generation can pursue their dreams as well.

That’s why I stand here tonight. Because for two hundred and thirty two years, at each moment when that promise was in jeopardy, ordinary men and women – students and soldiers, farmers and teachers, nurses and janitors — found the courage to keep it alive.

We meet at one of those defining moments – a moment when our nation is at war, our economy is in turmoil, and the American promise has been threatened once more.

Tonight, more Americans are out of work and more are working harder for less. More of you have lost your homes and even more are watching your home values plummet. More of you have cars you can’t afford to drive, credit card bills you can’t afford to pay, and tuition that’s beyond your reach.

These challenges are not all of government’s making. But the failure to respond is a direct result of a broken politics in Washington and the failed policies of George W. Bush.

America, we are better than these last eight years. We are a better country than this.

This country is more decent than one where a woman in Ohio, on the brink of retirement, finds herself one illness away from disaster after a lifetime of hard work.

This country is more generous than one where a man in Indiana has to pack up the equipment he’s worked on for twenty years and watch it shipped off to China, and then chokes up as he explains how he felt like a failure when he went home to tell his family the news.

We are more compassionate than a government that lets veterans sleep on our streets and families slide into poverty; that sits on its hands while a major American city drowns before our eyes.

Tonight, I say to the American people, to Democrats and Republicans and Independents across this great land – enough! This moment – this election – is our chance to keep, in the 21^st century, the American promise alive. Because next week, in Minnesota, the same party that brought you two terms of George Bush and Dick Cheney will ask this country for a third. And we are here because we love this country too much to let the next four years look like the last eight. On November 4^th, we must stand up and say: “Eight is enough.”

Now let there be no doubt. The Republican nominee, John McCain, has worn the uniform of our country with bravery and distinction, and for that we owe him our gratitude and respect. And next week, we’ll also hear about those occasions when he’s broken with his party as evidence that he can deliver the change that we need.

But the record’s clear: John McCain has voted with George Bush ninety percent of the time. Senator McCain likes to talk about judgment, but really, what does it say about your judgment when you think George Bush has been right more than ninety percent of the time? I don’t know about you, but I’m not ready to take a ten percent chance on change.

The truth is, on issue after issue that would make a difference in your lives – on health care and education and the economy – Senator McCain has been anything but independent. He said that our economy has made “great progress” under this President. He said that the fundamentals of the economy are strong. And when one of his chief advisors – the man who wrote his economic plan – was talking about the anxiety Americans are feeling, he said that we were just suffering from a “mental recession,” and that we’ve become, and I quote, “a nation of whiners.”

A nation of whiners? Tell that to the proud auto workers at a Michigan plant who, after they found out it was closing, kept showing up every day and working as hard as ever, because they knew there were people who counted on the brakes that they made. Tell that to the military families who shoulder their burdens silently as they watch their loved ones leave for their third or fourth or fifth tour of duty. These are not whiners. They work hard and give back and keep going without complaint. These are the Americans that I know.

Now, I don’t believe that Senator McCain doesn’t care what’s going on in the lives of Americans. I just think he doesn’t know. Why else would he define middle-class as someone making under five million dollars a year? How else could he propose hundreds of billions in tax breaks for big corporations and oil companies but not one penny of tax relief to more than one hundred million Americans? How else could he offer a health care plan that would actually tax people’s benefits, or an education plan that would do nothing to help families pay for college, or a plan that would privatize Social Security and gamble your retirement?

It’s not because John McCain doesn’t care. It’s because John McCain doesn’t get it.

For over two decades, he’s subscribed to that old, discredited Republican philosophy – give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else. In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society, but what it really means is – you’re on your own. Out of work? Tough luck. No health care? The market will fix it. Born into poverty? Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps – even if you don’t have boots. You’re on your own.

Well it’s time for them to own their failure. It’s time for us to change America.

You see, we Democrats have a very different measure of what constitutes progress in this country.

We measure progress by how many people can find a job that pays the mortgage; whether you can put a little extra money away at the end of each month so you can someday watch your child receive her college diploma. We measure progress in the 23 million new jobs that were created when Bill Clinton was President – when the average American family saw its income go up $7,500 instead of down $2,000 like it has under George Bush.

We measure the strength of our economy not by the number of billionaires we have or the profits of the Fortune 500, but by whether someone with a good idea can take a risk and start a new business, or whether the waitress who lives on tips can take a day off to look after a sick kid without losing her job – an economy that honors the dignity of work.

The fundamentals we use to measure economic strength are whether we are living up to that fundamental promise that has made this country great – a promise that is the only reason I am standing here tonight.

Because in the faces of those young veterans who come back from Iraq and Afghanistan, I see my grandfather, who signed up after Pearl Harbor, marched in Patton’s Army, and was rewarded by a grateful nation with the chance to go to college on the GI Bill.

In the face of that young student who sleeps just three hours before working the night shift, I think about my mom, who raised my sister and me on her own while she worked and earned her degree; who once turned to food stamps but was still able to send us to the best schools in the country with the help of student loans and scholarships.

When I listen to another worker tell me that his factory has shut down, I remember all those men and women on the South Side of Chicago who I stood by and fought for two decades ago after the local steel plant closed.

And when I hear a woman talk about the difficulties of starting her own business, I think about my grandmother, who worked her way up from the secretarial pool to middle-management, despite years of being passed over for promotions because she was a woman. She’s the one who taught me about hard work. She’s the one who put off buying a new car or a new dress for herself so that I could have a better life. She poured everything she had into me. And although she can no longer travel, I know that she’s watching tonight, and that tonight is her night as well.

I don’t know what kind of lives John McCain thinks that celebrities lead, but this has been mine. These are my heroes. Theirs are the stories that shaped me. And it is on their behalf that I intend to win this election and keep our promise alive as President of the United States.

What is that promise?

It’s a promise that says each of us has the freedom to make of our own lives what we will, but that we also have the obligation to treat each other with dignity and respect.

It’s a promise that says the market should reward drive and innovation and generate growth, but that businesses should live up to their responsibilities to create American jobs, look out for American workers, and play by the rules of the road.

Ours is a promise that says government cannot solve all our problems, but what it should do is that which we cannot do for ourselves – protect us from harm and provide every child a decent education; keep our water clean and our toys safe; invest in new schools and new roads and new science and technology.

Our government should work for us, not against us. It should help us, not hurt us. It should ensure opportunity not just for those with the most money and influence, but for every American who’s willing to work.

That’s the promise of America – the idea that we are responsible for ourselves, but that we also rise or fall as one nation; the fundamental belief that I am my brother’s keeper; I am my sister’s keeper.

That’s the promise we need to keep. That’s the change we need right now. So let me spell out exactly what that change would mean if I am President.

.

Change means a tax code that doesn’t reward the lobbyists who wrote it, but the American workers and small businesses who deserve it.

Unlike John McCain, I will stop giving tax breaks to corporations that ship jobs overseas, and I will start giving them to companies that create good jobs right here in America.

I will eliminate capital gains taxes for the small businesses and the start-ups that will create the high-wage, high-tech jobs of tomorrow.

I will cut taxes – cut taxes – for 95% of all working families. Because in an economy like this, the last thing we should do is raise taxes on the middle-class.

And for the sake of our economy, our security, and the future of our planet, I will set a clear goal as President: in ten years, we will finally end our dependence on oil from the Middle East.

Washington’s been talking about our oil addiction for the last thirty years, and John McCain has been there for twenty-six of them. In that time, he’s said no to higher fuel-efficiency standards for cars, no to investments in renewable energy, no to renewable fuels. And today, we import triple the amount of oil as the day that Senator McCain took office.

Now is the time to end this addiction, and to understand that drilling is a stop-gap measure, not a long-term solution. Not even close.

As President, I will tap our natural gas reserves, invest in clean coal technology, and find ways to safely harness nuclear power. I’ll help our auto companies re-tool, so that the fuel-efficient cars of the future are built right here in America. I’ll make it easier for the American people to afford these new cars. And I’ll invest 150 billion dollars over the next decade in affordable, renewable sources of energy – wind power and solar power and the next generation of biofuels; an investment that will lead to new industries and five million new jobs that pay well and can’t ever be outsourced.

America, now is not the time for small plans.

Now is the time to finally meet our moral obligation to provide every child a world-class education, because it will take nothing less to compete in the global economy. Michelle and I are only here tonight because we were given a chance at an education. And I will not settle for an America where some kids don’t have that chance. I’ll invest in early childhood education. I’ll recruit an army of new teachers, and pay them higher salaries and give them more support. And in exchange, I’ll ask for higher standards and more accountability. And we will keep our promise to every young American – if you commit to serving your community or your country, we will make sure you can afford a college education.

Now is the time to finally keep the promise of affordable, accessible health care for every single American. If you have health care, my plan will lower your premiums. If you don’t, you’ll be able to get the same kind of coverage that members of Congress give themselves. And as someone who watched my mother argue with insurance companies while she lay in bed dying of cancer, I will make certain those companies stop discriminating against those who are sick and need care the most.

Now is the time to help families with paid sick days and better family leave, because nobody in America should have to choose between keeping their jobs and caring for a sick child or ailing parent.

Now is the time to change our bankruptcy laws, so that your pensions are protected ahead of CEO bonuses; and the time to protect Social Security for future generations.

And now is the time to keep the promise of equal pay for an equal day’s work, because I want my daughters to have exactly the same opportunities as your sons.

Now, many of these plans will cost money, which is why I’ve laid out how I’ll pay for every dime – by closing corporate loopholes and tax havens that don’t help America grow. But I will also go through the federal budget, line by line, eliminating programs that no longer work and making the ones we do need work better and cost less – because we cannot meet twenty-first century challenges with a twentieth century bureaucracy.

And Democrats, we must also admit that fulfilling America’s promise will require more than just money. It will require a renewed sense of responsibility from each of us to recover what John F. Kennedy called our “intellectual and moral strength.” Yes, government must lead on energy independence, but each of us must do our part to make our homes and businesses more efficient. Yes, we must provide more ladders to success for young men who fall into lives of crime and despair. But we must also admit that programs alone can’t replace parents; that government can’t turn off the television and make a child do her homework; that fathers must take more responsibility for providing the love and guidance their children need.

Individual responsibility and mutual responsibility – that’s the essence of America’s promise.

And just as we keep our keep our promise to the next generation here at home, so must we keep America’s promise abroad. If John McCain wants to have a debate about who has the temperament, and judgment, to serve as the next Commander-in-Chief, that’s a debate I’m ready to have.

For while Senator McCain was turning his sights to Iraq just days after 9/11, I stood up and opposed this war, knowing that it would distract us from the real threats we face. When John McCain said we could just “muddle through” in Afghanistan, I argued for more resources and more troops to finish the fight against the terrorists who actually attacked us on 9/11, and made clear that we must take out Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants if we have them in our sights. John McCain likes to say that he’ll follow bin Laden to the Gates of Hell – but he won’t even go to the cave where he lives.

And today, as my call for a time frame to remove our troops from Iraq has been echoed by the Iraqi government and even the Bush Administration, even after we learned that Iraq has a $79 billion surplus while we’re wallowing in deficits, John McCain stands alone in his stubborn refusal to end a misguided war.

That’s not the judgment we need. That won’t keep America safe. We need a President who can face the threats of the future, not keep grasping at the ideas of the past.

You don’t defeat a terrorist network that operates in eighty countries by occupying Iraq. You don’t protect Israel and deter Iran just by talking tough in Washington. You can’t truly stand up for Georgia when you’ve strained our oldest alliances. If John McCain wants to follow George Bush with more tough talk and bad strategy, that is his choice – but it is not the change we need.

We are the party of Roosevelt. We are the party of Kennedy. So don’t tell me that Democrats won’t defend this country. Don’t tell me that Democrats won’t keep us safe. The Bush-McCain foreign policy has squandered the legacy that generations of Americans — Democrats and Republicans – have built, and we are here to restore that legacy.

As Commander-in-Chief, I will never hesitate to defend this nation, but I will only send our troops into harm’s way with a clear mission and a sacred commitment to give them the equipment they need in battle and the care and benefits they deserve when they come home.

I will end this war in Iraq responsibly, and finish the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. I will rebuild our military to meet future conflicts. But I will also renew the tough, direct diplomacy that can prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons and curb Russian aggression. I will build new partnerships to defeat the threats of the 21st century: terrorism and nuclear proliferation; poverty and genocide; climate change and disease. And I will restore our moral standing, so that America is once again that last, best hope for all who are called to the cause of freedom, who long for lives of peace, and who yearn for a better future.

These are the policies I will pursue. And in the weeks ahead, I look forward to debating them with John McCain.

But what I will not do is suggest that the Senator takes his positions for political purposes. Because one of the things that we have to change in our politics is the idea that people cannot disagree without challenging each other’s character and patriotism.

The times are too serious, the stakes are too high for this same partisan playbook. So let us agree that patriotism has no party. I love this country, and so do you, and so does John McCain. The men and women who serve in our battlefields may be Democrats and Republicans and Independents, but they have fought together and bled together and some died together under the same proud flag. They have not served a Red America or a Blue America – they have served the United States of America.

So I’ve got news for you, John McCain. We all put our country first.

America, our work will not be easy. The challenges we face require tough choices, and Democrats as well as Republicans will need to cast off the worn-out ideas and politics of the past. For part of what has been lost these past eight years can’t just be measured by lost wages or bigger trade deficits. What has also been lost is our sense of common purpose – our sense of higher purpose. And that’s what we have to restore.

We may not agree on abortion, but surely we can agree on reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies in this country. The reality of gun ownership may be different for hunters in rural Ohio than for those plagued by gang-violence in Cleveland, but don’t tell me we can’t uphold the Second Amendment while keeping AK-47s out of the hands of criminals. I know there are differences on same-sex marriage, but surely we can agree that our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters deserve to visit the person they love in the hospital and to live lives free of discrimination. Passions fly on immigration, but I don’t know anyone who benefits when a mother is separated from her infant child or an employer undercuts American wages by hiring illegal workers. This too is part of America’s promise – the promise of a democracy where we can find the strength and grace to bridge divides and unite in common effort.

I know there are those who dismiss such beliefs as happy talk. They claim that our insistence on something larger, something firmer and more honest in our public life is just a Trojan Horse for higher taxes and the abandonment of traditional values. And that’s to be expected. Because if you don’t have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare the voters. If you don’t have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from.

You make a big election about small things.

And you know what – it’s worked before. Because it feeds into the cynicism we all have about government. When Washington doesn’t work, all its promises seem empty. If your hopes have been dashed again and again, then it’s best to stop hoping, and settle for what you already know.

I get it. I realize that I am not the likeliest candidate for this office. I don’t fit the typical pedigree, and I haven’t spent my career in the halls of Washington.

But I stand before you tonight because all across America something is stirring. What the nay-sayers don’t understand is that this election has never been about me. It’s been about you.

For eighteen long months, you have stood up, one by one, and said enough to the politics of the past. You understand that in this election, the greatest risk we can take is to try the same old politics with the same old players and expect a different result. You have shown what history teaches us – that at defining moments like this one, the change we need doesn’t come from Washington. Change comes to Washington. Change happens because the American people demand it – because they rise up and insist on new ideas and new leadership, a new politics for a new time.

America, this is one of those moments.

I believe that as hard as it will be, the change we need is coming. Because I’ve seen it. Because I’ve lived it. I’ve seen it in Illinois, when we provided health care to more children and moved more families from welfare to work. I’ve seen it in Washington, when we worked across party lines to open up government and hold lobbyists more accountable, to give better care for our veterans and keep nuclear weapons out of terrorist hands.

And I’ve seen it in this campaign. In the young people who voted for the first time, and in those who got involved again after a very long time. In the Republicans who never thought they’d pick up a Democratic ballot, but did. I’ve seen it in the workers who would rather cut their hours back a day than see their friends lose their jobs, in the soldiers who re-enlist after losing a limb, in the good neighbors who take a stranger in when a hurricane strikes and the floodwaters rise.

This country of ours has more wealth than any nation, but that’s not what makes us rich. We have the most powerful military on Earth, but that’s not what makes us strong. Our universities and our culture are the envy of the world, but that’s not what keeps the world coming to our shores.

Instead, it is that American spirit – that American promise – that pushes us forward even when the path is uncertain; that binds us together in spite of our differences; that makes us fix our eye not on what is seen, but what is unseen, that better place around the bend.

That promise is our greatest inheritance. It’s a promise I make to my daughters when I tuck them in at night, and a promise that you make to yours – a promise that has led immigrants to cross oceans and pioneers to travel west; a promise that led workers to picket lines, and women to reach for the ballot.

And it is that promise that forty five years ago today, brought Americans from every corner of this land to stand together on a Mall in Washington, before Lincoln’s Memorial, and hear a young preacher from Georgia speak of his dream.

The men and women who gathered there could’ve heard many things. They could’ve heard words of anger and discord. They could’ve been told to succumb to the fear and frustration of so many dreams deferred.

But what the people heard instead – people of every creed and color, from every walk of life – is that in America, our destiny is inextricably linked. That together, our dreams can be one.

“We cannot walk alone,” the preacher cried. “And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back.”

America, we cannot turn back. Not with so much work to be done. Not with so many children to educate, and so many veterans to care for. Not with an economy to fix and cities to rebuild and farms to save. Not with so many families to protect and so many lives to mend. America, we cannot turn back. We cannot walk alone. At this moment, in this election, we must pledge once more to march into the future. Let us keep that promise – that American promise – and in the words of Scripture hold firmly, without wavering, to the hope that we confess.

Thank you, God Bless you, and God Bless the United States of America.

6:46pm: Gore comes out. Invesco is going nuts. He says if he was president we’d never have invaded Iraq.

6:48pm: Gore on McCain taking Bush’s 3rd term: “I believe in recycling but this is rediculous.”

6:49pm: Gore is fired up, looking thin, rested, comfortable and passionate. A great attack dog on McCain. “A foreign policy that is smart as well as strong.”

6:50pm: “I know something about close elections… I believe this election is so close because the forces of the status quo are so desperately afraid of the change Barack Obama represents.” Rarely has someone proven more able to mix total in-the-weeds-scientific wonkery and palpable, undeniable, inspiring passion.

“Military experts warn us about security concerns… from global warming.” Also Suemedha Sood!

6:51pm: Gore on McCain: he allowed the right “to browbeat him” on the climate crisis.

I saw Gore give a similar address in Austin for Netroots Nation. He’s actually able to do this kind of stuff off-the-cuff. Can you imagine ad libbing something that uses the word “geothermal”?

6:53pm: “Some of the best marketers have the worst products,” like, um, “the special interests that have come to control the Republican Party.”

Last night Kerry. Tonight Gore. There’s clearly something about losing a presidential election that liberates you. “shame and disgrace and failure” — George Washington on torture, as quoted by Al Gore. Thunderous cheers.

6:55pm: “We’re all tired of appeals based on fear… You’re hungry for a new politics based on bipartisan respect for the ageless principles embodied in the United States Constitution.” Our “very way of life” depends on it. You can see why the left calls him The Goracle.

6:56pm: Gore references Lincoln. Eight years as a state legislator in Springfield, one term in Congress, and the wisdom to “oppose a war popular when started.”

Obama as Lincoln: wisdom to oppose a disastrous war at an epic moment in our history. “Inconvenient truths must be acknowledged if we are to have wise governance.” Hehe. Subtle!

Hey, if you want this direct, my friend Ari emailed me the text of Gore’s remarks.

7:00pm: Gore reads a benediction — you would not believe what this sounds like to an audience that can stamp its feet at a football stadium.

Barely 20 minutes of barn-burning passion by a man who should have been president. The earth is notably warmer after that speech.

Gross is having none of it. If you are making over $250,000 a year, Gross says, “I regret to inform you that you are indeed rich.” From Gross:

To a large degree, feeling rich or poor is a state of mind, as John McCain recently noted. “Some people are wealthy and rich in their lives and their children and their ability to educate them. Others are poor if they’re billionaires.” But income data can surely tell us something. And they tell us that $250,000 puts you in pretty fancy company. The Census Bureau earlier this week reported that the median household income was $50,223 in 2007—up slightly from the last year but still below the 1999 peak. So a household that earned $250,000 made five times the median. In fact, as this chart shows, only 2.245 million U.S. households, the top 1.9 percent, had income greater than $250,000 in 2007. (About 20 percent of households make more than $100,000.)

This is an interesting debate to be having in the middle of a Democratic National Convention where economic populism has served as a major theme. Everyone wants to help the middle class. But defining what, exactly, constitutes the middle class is a different question entirely. Some people earning $250,000 might actually consider themselves middle class, if they live in Washington or San Francisco rather than Cleveland or Detroit. Or if their neighbors are extremely wealthy and they are doing well, but not quite as well. I’ve always thought a great debate question would have been to ask each candidate how he or she defines the middle class. I wonder what Mitt Romney might have said?

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) (WDCpix)

DENVER — When last the Democrats decided to make national security a theme at their convention, biography was everything. John Kerry, the party’s 2004 nominee, was a bona fide war hero, and the campaign made sure everyone knew it. Starting with Kerry’s arrival at the FleetCenter from across Boston’s Charles River, to recall his Vietnam service aboard a Swift Boat; to the parade of retired generals and admirals declaring their support; to Kerry’s famous opening line declaring “reporting for duty,” the Democrats gambled that Kerry’s heroic service would invest him with the national-security bona fides to elect him president.

Beneath the pageantry, however, was a bluff. Kerry’s actual national-security message didn’t draw sharp distinctions with President George W. Bush’s policies. Kerry had voted for the Iraq invasion and refused to repudiate his decision. Kerry embraced the president’s “war on terror” formulation and tactics for addressing the Al Qaeda terrorist network. Kerry’s critique of Bush focused on his competence, suggesting that the Democratic nominee embraced Bush’s policies and wanted only to fine-tune them. The election results — Bush won a more solid victory then in 2000 — speaks to the wisdom of that strategy.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

When the Democrats talk tonight about national security, 2004 will appear like a long-forgotten, sepia-toned era. The campaign of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) represents a quantum leap in terms of both style and substance. Rather than arguing that they can more competently execute Bush administration policies, as they did in 2004, the 2008-vintage Democratic Party, led by Obama, is presenting a more thoroughgoing critique. It begins with a clear timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. But it does not stop there.

Along with this new vigor on foreign policy is a sense of political confidence that the public is ready, in the wake of the failures of the Bush era, to embrace liberal solutions for national security. By contrast, it will be the Republicans in Minnesota who rely on war heroism to distract from their continuity with the Bush era.

“There’s a confidence, a strength and an infrastructure on national security that I’ve never seen before in this party,” said Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and an influential foreign-policy thinker in Democratic circles. “Crisis always creates opportunity, and this is no exception.”

It can be fairly said that the liberal positions on Iraq have been vindicated. Even Bush has been forced to accept the principle of setting a timetable for withdrawing from Iraq, something he has said for four years would be a disaster — and something Obama has campaigned on from the beginning. Even if Bush hadn’t accepted that principle, Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, effectively ended the debate by demanding that the U.S. withdraw from Iraq entirely by 2011.

That has discredited not only Bush and Sen. John McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee, but also the Democratic Party’s Iraq hawks, who also counseled against withdrawal. Yet those advisers have been notably absent from the Obama campaign.

Unlike his rivals for the Democratic nomination — and his predecessor for it — Obama surrounded himself not with the sensible-center of Democratic foreign-policy advisers, but those who found themselves out of favor in Democratic circles for being too liberal. They were considered too opposed to the war in iraq, too opposed to accommodating Bush and too forthright about traditional liberal internationalism. The hawkish Richard Holbrooke, a close confident of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Al Gore and Kerry, is out, while his old friend and rival, the relatively dovish Anthony Lake, is in.

Obama’s core of most trusted foreign-policy advisers are young men: Denis McDonough from the liberal Center for American Progress and an ex-adviser to former top Senate Democrat Tom Daschle, is in his mid 30s; Ben Rhodes, a protege of Lee Hamilton, the elder statesman from the 9/11 Commission and the Iraq Study Group, is barely 30.

Several other top aides also come from the liberal wings of the party: former State Dept. hands Greg Craig and Susan Rice; Sarah Sewell from Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights; Clinton-era Navy Secretary Richard Danzig, and ret. Air Force Gen. Scott Gration, who managed the air war during the invasion of Iraq.

Several of them have been on hand in Denver during the past few days to offer a glimpse of both the substance and the style of Obama’s foreign policy.

Somewhat surprisingly, Danzig suggested that an Obama administration will apply the lessons of counterinsurgency — a method of warfare that emphasizes economy of force, intimate knowledge of host populations and politico-economic incentives to win that population’s allegiance — to the global fight against Al Qaeda. “I don’t think this is the property of the Bush administration or Sen. McCain,” Danzig said at a forum Tuesday sponsored by the Truman National Security Project. “We in the Obama campaign have very much supported that counterinsurgency doctrine.”

Danzig, who has an impish streak, openly attacked McCain’s steadiness in judgment — the heart of McCain’s argument to be president. He did so by saying that Obama possesses an “evenness of temperament… to contrast with what I’ll call the other candidate.” Pressed by Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) to say McCain’s name, Danzig replied, “John McCain is well known for his ability to lose it.”

Both Danzig and Craig — one of the first Clinton associates to sign on with Obama — indicated an eagerness to take actions on the world stage that just a few years ago would have been unacceptable to the Washington-based foreign-policy consensus. Obama “will engage the U.S. with Iran,” Craig said at a forum Wednesday morning sponsored by the New America Foundation. “We took heat for [saying] it, but he stood tall by it. … as we found over and over and over again, the American people agreed with him. They thought it was natural, strong and wise for us to engage with our adversaries.”

Craig and Danzig both promised a direct and major presidential engagement with the Muslim world during the first year of Obama’s term, with the potential president making a speech in a major Islamic capitol — something unthinkable from Bush. “[It will] lead to a greater understanding, greater dialogue and greater exchange, I hope with the Islamic world,” Craig said.

Yet Danzig stated bluntly that Obama is open to a unilateral military strike on Al Qaeda in Pakistan if the Pakistani government proves intransigent. “I think that there is a role for force [in Pakistan], and Sen. Obama has been clear about this,” Danzig warned, reprising a point that earned Obama media jibes last year. “We have to be honest in saying we have some interests that are at play there.”

Perhaps the most striking example of Obama’s break from the last several years of Democratic foreign-policy timidity has come from, ironically, Kerry.

Kerry endorsed Obama in January, shortly after Obama’s Iowa victory, while the race for the Democratic nomination was still in flux. Since then, he has emerged as a pugnacious advocate for Obama on the campaign trail and on the chat-show circuit, displaying an intensity that some observers think was lacking in his own 2004 run for the White House.

In that race, Kerry tred cautiously on security questions. In the summer of 2004, for example, that he would have invaded Iraq even if he had known it did not possess weapons of mass destruction, and critiquing Bush based on questions of implementation rather than basic wisdom.

That Kerry is gone. “The concept of, quote, ‘war on terror’ is a terrible misnomer for the challenge we face, which is a global counterinsurgency,” Kerry said Wednesday morning at the New America Foundation panel. “We need to rethink — not rebrand, rethink — what to do with our information strategy, since counterinsurgency is based on the center of gravity of the population.”

Pivoting to a basic critique of the war he ill-fatedly voted for — and later apologized for voting for — Kerry continued, “Iraq has worked completely counter to that… [and] this is a central thesis, and one of the great strengths, of Obama’s strategy. He understand it. John McCain does not.” The speculation is that Kerry is auditioning to become Obama’s secretary of state.

Campaign insiders say to expect a lot more along Kerry’s lines during tonight’s speeches. Kerry, of course, will speak tonight. Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), a West Point graduate and retired Army Ranger, is expected to address the damage done to the military by Bush and continuing on into a potential McCain administration.

Iraq veterans John Melvin and Tammy Duckworth — a netroots favorite and unsuccessful candidate for an Illinois congressional seat in 2006 — will discuss the war. And Sen. Joe Biden, the party’s combatative vice presidential nominee, is expected to excoriate McCain on every aspect of his foreign policy, his judgment and his competence to be commander-in-chief.

All of this, of course, might not work. Polls still show that while foreign policy ranks behind the economy in terms of what the public will vote on, McCain is outperforming Obama on key questions of who is more trusted on terrorism and to run the military. And many liberals here in Denver think that the convention so far has soft-pedalled the highly unpopular Iraq war to the candidate’s detriment.

Yet what the Obama campaign has already proven is that, unlike in 2004, the choice facing the country is between the left-most and right-most poles of foreign-policy thinking in the two parties. The November election, therefore, can be fairly said to provide a mandate to the next president on what to do about Iraq, Afghanistan/Pakistan, Iran and a host of other foreign-policy issues. And that mandate will, Obama advisers believe, inspire action.

“The impact of an election that produces an Obama presidency is huge,” Craig said, since Obama would be the nation’s first African-American president. “I think it strengthens the capacity of the president [to lead]… McCain has a strategy to remain in Iraq, and if that’s what country wants, they can vote on it.” Naturally, of course, Craig doesn’t think the country will.
,