US: Sometimes a convention speech can shut up the talkers at the back of the hall, bring people tip-toeing in from the corridors and leave jaded commentators at a loss for words other than "Wa-oh!", reports Conor O'Clery
So it was on Tuesday night when Barack Obama, "a skinny kid with a funny name" from Chicago, who is running for the US Senate, started to speak. Obama is hoping to become only the fifth black senator in history and is a near certainty for election after his popular Republican opponent, Jack Ryan, dropped out over the disclosure that he wanted to have public sex with his wife.
Eager to promote the black vote and cultivate a rising star, Democrat leaders gave Obama a prime time slot on Tuesday. He outlined his personal history as the son of an immigrant from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. He got a law degree from Harvard, where he was the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. At 42 he is not a kid any more and he displayed an oratorical flair that owed much to Martin Luther King. He spoke of America as one people out of many people, "E Pluribus Unum", and why they should care about everyone.
"If there's a child on the south side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me, even if it's not my child," he said. "If there's a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for her prescription drugs, that makes my life poorer even if it's not my grandparent. If there's an Arab-American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties.
"It's that fundamental belief - I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper - that makes this country work." He castigated the "spin masters and negative ad peddlers" who would divide America. "I say to them tonight, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America, there's the United States of America." A ripple of applause began to build to a wave as he went on: "There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America." He spoke of the hard reality of workers losing jobs to outsourcing or being denied healthcare, or not having the money for college. "Don't get me wrong," he said; the people he met didn't want tax squandered on welfare programmes. The government alone couldn't teach kids to learn.
"Parents have to parent, children can't achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white." He told of meeting a young Iraq-bound solider called Seamus who had enlisted in the military from a sense of patriotism and duty. "But then I asked myself, are we serving Seamus as well as he was serving us?" When America sent young men and women into harm's way, "we have a solemn obligation not to fudge the numbers or shade the truth about why they're going, and to never - ever - go to war without enough troops to win the war, secure the peace and earn the respect of the world".
A successful convention speech is no guarantee of a political future but Barack Obama had the convention buzzing with talk of "a star is born".
People exhaled in delight after he finished, and then held their breath for another speech from an African-American of a different colour. Teresa Heinz Kerry, the Mozambique-born wife of Senator John Kerry, had on Sunday confirmed her reputation for outspokenness by telling a reporter to "shove it". Party big- shots were on edge as she began. She disarmed her critics right away. "My name is Teresa Heinz Kerry, and I hope it will come as no surprise that I have something to say." She described how she protested against apartheid in 1950s Johannesburg and how living in a dictatorship meant that her Portuguese father never got to vote until he was 73. She knew how precious freedom was, she said. "My right to speak my mind, to have a voice, to be what some would call opinionated is a right I cherish." The heir to the Heinz fortune got a warm reception, but there will be a sigh of relief from Democratic Party HQ if she gets through the autumn without further verbal incidents.
Howard Dean got a rapturous reception which prompted him to say he had once hoped for a reception like that but that it would have been on Thursday (nomination) night, not on Tuesday night.
All the speakers were upstaged by 12-year-old Ilana Wexler from Oakland, California, founder of a grassroots website called kidsforkerry.org. She told how she skipped camp this year to work for the Kerry campaign because she liked Kerry's commitment to education, America and children. The delegates cheered when the seventh-grader, with her teeth braces, ginger hair and breathless delivery, chastised Dick Cheney for his recent use of a four-letter word in an exchange with Senator Patrick Leahy on the Senate floor. "When our Vice-President had a disagreement with a Democratic senator, he used a really bad word," Ilana said. "If I said that word, I would be put in a timeout. I think he should be put in a timeout."
There was some bad language on the convention floor when Michael Moore berated CNN's Bill Hemmer over the presenter's comment on air that "I've heard people say they wish Michael Moore were dead."
"A lot of our kids are dead because a lot of those f***ers haven't done their job," Moore later said, according to New Republic Online.
Meanwhile, the parties continued around Boston. The Clintons were spotted partying well after midnight in the Charles Hotel, Cambridge, where a gate-crasher reported that the former president confided he had been hearing doubts from moderate voters who "think Kerry's smart; they're not sure he's tough". That is a worry delegates express in private and they are looking to Kerry to convince them tonight that it ain't so in his acceptance speech. After Clinton on Monday and Obama on Tuesday, he has two hard acts to follow.