Sisterhood of the Traveling Pantsuits

Matt Cooper in Denver: In some ways there was no drama about the second night of the convention, despite the efforts of the cable-news networks to drum up Clinton-Obama dissention.

CNN, Fox, and MSNBC seem determined at times to find any crank with a Hillary button so they could write about some conflict at this otherwise-rather-unified convention. You had to wonder if Hillary Clinton's delegates all gave Barack Obama a kidney, or two, would they opine about why they didn't deliver their livers, too. At 45, I'm old enough to have seen real divided conventions—the Democrats in '80, the Republicans in '76. This isn't it.

Still, there was an aesthetic question. Could Hillary endorse Obama in a way that was elegant, seemingly sincere, and convincing enough to her die hard supporters? I thought she executed it almost perfectly. The main thing she did was not to go too overboard in praising Obama.

She made a barebones case for her former rival: He's not McCain. He did some good things, like fighting for bottom-up change. But because it was spare, it, at the very least, seemed sincere. Had she lavished praise on his short Senate tenure, or hailed him s a tough competitor, it might have seemed insincere. Her tip of the hat to her husband seemed sly and well-timed. She saluted him as president, not as a husband, which is smart because the reverse would have seemed ludicrous. She dissed McCain better than anybody who had mounted the podium thus far, certainly more than the cell-phone license king turned pol, Mark Warner. The Twin Cities line was a classic, humorous and cutting: "It makes perfect sense than John McCain and George Bush will be together next week in the Twin Cities because these days they are awfully hard to tell apart."

Part of why she stood out is that all of the other speeches, with the exception of Michelle Obama's, have been so flat, so rote, so obviously put through the apparatchiks of the Obama campaign. Each of the bit players have echoed familiar themes: McCain is more of the same. He has seven houses. Yada. yada. Clinton made the same points but at least she had language that stirred attention. Her shot at Putin and Iran put some steel in a convention that has seemed indifferent to the ambitious dictators around the globe. It was a little echo of 3 a.m. ads. a reminder of her spine. But it didn't ring to Obama's detriment.

You felt like a star was on stage and you couldn't help but be a bit wistful that she wasn't veep, for whatever strengths Joe Biden brings to the Democratic ticket. Love her or hate her, she is big and compelling and not forgettable. By Thursday, Bill Clinton's speech, Al Gore's and Biden's and Obama's himself may have overshadowed this electric address. But for now it's the high-water mark of an otherwise drab affair.

Matt Cooper

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