The class I teach at USC had its first session today so I missed most of the convention and have been catching up via TiVo. It's not a bad way to view it since you can speed through an awful lot of nothing.
My overwhelming impression of the evening was annoyance at myself. I half-believed all those pundits and talking heads who said that Hillary and her supporters would fracture the party, driving a wedge that could never be healed. I don't know to what extent that possibility was exaggerated by wishful Republicans and/or reporters hyping a possible story…and to what extent skillful negotiation prevented a train wreck. But it sure turned out to be a lot of worry about something that didn't happen.
I was disappointed in Joe Biden's speech…a couple of good lines but it didn't sound like him. I'm also a little tired of speeches where the idea is to end each sentence with a catch-phrase and encourage the audience to join in on it. There was also another thing about it that bothered me but I want to think about how to phrase what I'm feeling so I'll save that for a later post.
Bill Clinton was great. He's always great at this kind of thing…but you know who surprised me? John Kerry. I never thought of him as a great giver of speeches but tonight, a mere four years too late, he seemed to have learned how it's done. It didn't get a lot of TV coverage so I decided to embed it here. If you have thirteen minutes, give it a look.