ALL-AMERICAN GUY

Posted at 8:03 a.m. ET

This is almost too much.  Get out the insulin.  You'll need it. 

The New York Times reports on the Obama camp's goal of projecting an all-American image during the Dem convention next week.  Of course, that doesn't include encouraging an American victory in Iraq, but you can't have everything.

Democrats face a number of imperatives at their convention, none trickier than making more voters comfortable with the prospect of putting a candidate with a most unusual background — the son of a black Kenyan father and a white Kansan mother, who grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia — and his family in the White House. No one, his advisers believe, makes the case better for Senator Barack Obama of Illinois than his wife, who will expand her profile by delivering one of the marquee speeches carried by television networks.

Michelle?  Really?  Isn't she the one who said America is mean-spirited?  Isn't she the one who said this is the first time she's been proud of her country?  Didn't she say she couldn't find money for piano lessons despite making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year?  This is ideal casting?

At the convention beginning next Monday in Denver, there will be appearances by lesser known “Americans from all walks of life, from across the country” speaking about their support for Mr. Obama. Combined with a film featuring the candidate in all-American scenes by Davis Guggenheim — the director of “An Inconvenient Truth” whose father produced a similar biographical film for Robert F. Kennedy — aides to Mr. Obama are using the convention to tackle what members of both parties see as his greatest vulnerability with undecided voters: his “otherness.”

So to combat his "otherness" they get the guy who directed Al Gore's film?  Why is this not a fit?

With Republicans pressing questions about his religious background, party planners will inaugurate the convention with an “interfaith gathering” of clergy.

When have Republicans pressed questions about Obama's religious background?  That's not what the Wright controversy was about?  Don't they realize that?

When he delivers his speech on the last night of the convention, Mr. Obama will not be addressing the crowd from a lone lectern at the edge of the field; he will be standing at the 50-yard line, surrounded by a diverse set of people he has met throughout the campaign, whose presence is intended to signal to viewers at home that people like them are O.K. with Mr. Obama. Ten people selected by the campaign from all corners of the country will meet backstage with Mr. Obama and be shown to the television audience, also intended to convey their comfort level with the senator.

Do you get the feeling that this will all look like a massive talking down to the American people?  Will Americans buy this stuff?

“There are two overriding strategic imperatives for the convention: One is to make people comfortable with Barack Obama,” said Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster who served as a top strategist for Senator John Kerry’s presidential race in 2004. “The other is to define the race clearly and define Barack Obama as change and McCain as a continuation of Bush’s policies at home and abroad.”

How about defining what this change is all about?  How about explaining how Barack Obama will deal with the vast foreign and security challenges we face?  How about presenting a potential president, not a new brand name, cellophane-wrapped?

But that would require respect for the voters.  Not much of that in this crowd.

August 18, 2008.