'Part celebration and part anxiety'
DENVER — Striving for unity and spoiling for a fight with Republicans, Democrats from across the country gathered Sunday on the front edge of the Rocky Mountains for a history-making convention tinged with concern over a presidential race grown closer than many expected.
The nervousness belies broad political trends favoring the party and Barack Obama, its nominee-to-be: an unpopular war, a sour economy and a Republican president at basement level in opinion polls. Despite those advantages -- and his prodigious fundraising -- Obama's lead in national surveys has all but evaporated over the last month, renewing concerns about the senator's relative inexperience and political durability.
"It's going to be part celebration and part anxiety," Donna Brazile, who ran Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign, said of the Democratic gathering that begins today.
By sharpening his message over the next four days -- narrowing the gap between his high-flown rhetoric and voters' kitchen-table concerns -- and building his image beyond a celebrity stereotype, the Illinois senator hopes to make the election a choice between himself and GOP Sen. John McCain, not just a straight referendum on Obama. He also hopes to patch, once and for all, his differences with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and her followers.
"It's important for him and the convention as a whole to lay out the distinctions and comparisons between himself and McCain," said Jim Jordan, a Democratic strategist. "He needs to show that he can take off the gloves."
Whatever happens in November, history will be made this week in the thin night air of Denver.
Obama's nomination and his 50-yard-line acceptance speech Thursday in the city's football stadium will not only cap a remarkable political upset, but will also represent a milestone: It will be the first time an African American carries a major party's standard into the fall presidential campaign.
More than 50,000 visitors -- delegates, political dignitaries, protesters, lobbyists and thousands of reporters dispatched to chronicle their movements -- continued to pour into this capital city Sunday, beneath a sunny blue sky. Police swarmed downtown, giving the blocks around the convention site a paramilitary feel, and the week's first organized protest -- an antiwar march -- came off without a hitch.
