What a week. I'm sorry the Sarah Palin news delayed my reaction to Barack Obama's electrifying acceptance speech Thursday night. Of course the timing was designed to limit the positive aftershocks from Obama's big night; the McCain people are running a good campaign.

I'd been a critic of Obama's decision to move the event to Invesco Field, but I loved being there. (Getting there: not so much. Look for Caitlin Shamberg's video of our Salon pilgrimage coming soon). Likewise I've been skeptical of how much one more Obama speech could accomplish, but this one was different: Filled with more specifics, but also, animated by a feistier tone, and I like the new Fighting Barack Obama.

I loved the way he went after John McCain – and George W. Bush. I loved the anger in his voice when he delivered the line: "Tonight, I say to the American people, to Democrats and Republicans and Independents across this great land - enough!" You can hear more of my thoughts in this Current video from Invesco Field, where I look tired but happy after a long day in the Denver sun (text continues below the video):

One of my favorite parts was his shot at McCain advisor Phil Gramm, who famously dismissed talk of economic trouble by calling us "a nation of whiners." Obama shot back: "A nation of whiners? Tell that to the proud auto workers at a Michigan plant who, after they found out it was closing, kept showing up every day and working as hard as ever, because they knew there were people who counted on the brakes that they made. Tell that to the military families who shoulder their burdens silently as they watch their loved ones leave for their third or fourth or fifth tour of duty. These are not whiners. They work hard and give back and keep going without complaint. These are the Americans that I know."

On that score, I loved the Americans Obama chose for the last segment before he spoke – "average" Americans from swing states. I was prepared to daydream through their speeches awaiting the main event, but they were all terrific, particularly displaced Indiana factory worker Barney Smith, who got off one of the night's best lines: "We need a president who puts Barney Smith before Smith Barney,"

I think Obama has to keep hitting his economic message hard, hitting McCain – and Bush – just as hard, and thinking about Barney Smith. The Denver convention failed on that score Monday and Tuesday night, but Wednesday and Thursday the party found its voice.

And I hope you kept up with all the great Denver coverage on Open Salon, including Invesco accounts by Dave Cullen and marytkelly.

I just watched Paul Begala attribute Sarah Palin's poise at her Friday V.P. announcement to her "beauty pageant training." CNN's Campbell Brown immediately called him on it, and Begala only dug his hole deeper, telling America that his wife, too, is a beauty queen, who also has two Ph.D.s. "There's nothing wrong with being good looking," Begala told Brown, who seemed flabbergasted.

Knock it off, Paul. There's plenty of reason to criticize McCain's Hail-Mary pick of Palin, but it's disturbing to watch a die-hard Hillary Clinton supporter dismissing a female politician with sexist digs. She's been in politics for many years, she's had plenty of time to develop poise. Criticize her right-wing politics, her creationist beliefs, her lack of experience, but the beauty-queen crap is getting old -- and it's only 12 hours.

John McCain's pick of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate is either bold or desperate, or maybe both. The big risk to the selection was spotlighted by the odd symbolism of the day he chose her, his 72nd birthday, highlighting questions of age and mortality. Is this 44-year-old one-term governor with no foreign policy credentials really ready to be president if something were to happen to McCain? We don't know yet.

The contrast of age and gender means McCain and Palin didn't look like running mates standing together today in Dayton, but the McCain team is betting that's a good thing in a year when voters crave change. Palin is so unknown it's impossible to judge yet whether this was a smart pick for McCain. Certainly it's a great narrative: She's a gun-toting, motorcycle-riding, basketball-playing mother of five whose husband is a steelworker; you can see her talking kitchen table issues much more naturally than McCain or his wife, Cindy. McCain said as much today, noting that "she understands" the problems of rising gas and food prices. (McCain's underlying message: And I don't.) She lets the GOP continue to dream of making inroads among Hillary Clinton's female constituency.

But the pick was really intended to wow the Christian right. Palin is a staunch antiabortion Christian conservative; every story about her notes that she chose not to abort her fifth child, now 4 months old, even after she discovered he had Down syndrome. (The fact that the decision is newsworthy creates a weird implication that a Democratic woman would make a different decision.) The pick let McCain pander to the Christian right (who ruled out his choice of Joe Lieberman and Tom Ridge) while seeming like a social reformer.

Palin didn't talk about abortion or any divisive social issues in her short, sweet speech Friday morning. She lionized John McCain and made a strong pitch to women, praising the Democrats' first female vice presidential candidate, Geraldine Ferraro (another casualty of the rough Democratic primary), as well as the "determination and grace" of Hillary Clinton. Noting that her selection came "almost 88 years to the day that the women of America gained the right to vote," she pointed to the 18 million cracks Clinton voters put in the glass ceiling and promised "we can shatter that glass ceiling once and for all with her election." That's not quite true, since Clinton was running for president and Palin's up for vice president, but it's a nice notion.

Can it possibly work? I don't think so, but we'll see what kind of a campaigner Palin turns out to be. I think choice is too central to the concerns of Democratic women to make Palin anything more than an attractive, interesting conservative politician, one they might admire, but never vote for. Still, it was clear from all the women's outreach in Denver that the GOP is serious about trying to capitalize on women's lingering unhappiness about the end of Clinton's campaign. I think the last two unifying, uplifting days of the convention reduced the number of women ripe for Palin's pitch, but we'll see. The biggest question about Palin, though, is her lack of experience, especially in any role that gave her foreign policy perspective. She'll have a lot of work to do before debating Joe Biden.

Still, I can't help being a little pleased at the social change the pick makes real. A night after watching the first African-American accept the Democratic nomination, we woke to find the first woman had been chosen to be the Republican vice-presidential nominee. The race just got a lot more interesting.

For all the stories about the dysfunctional tensions between the Clinton and Obama camps in the last two weeks, it's worth singling out what may remain the best moment of this convention, even after Barack Obama blows everyone away at Invesco Field Thursday night. And that was Wednesday's roll call vote. It was handled with an incredible dignity and sweetness that went a long way to redeeming the bitter feelings on both sides. It even had a tiny bit of suspense, not about the outcome, but exactly how it would end.

And when Illinois yielded to New York, and Hillary Clinton, speaking from the floor, in the heart of her delegation, moved to nominate Barack Obama by acclamation, well, that was catharsis. Sometimes catharsis is angry, sometimes it's quiet and calm; wholeness is restored. The entire roll-call process was a healing ritual handled by both sides with kindness and even tenderness, which you rarely see in politics.

And yet politics is the art of getting your heart broken, over and over again, and then getting back into the game -- and even rooting for the person who broke your heart. That the brawling, competitive Clintons could do that with such grace and conviction is the ultimate proof of their political greatness, despite their flaws. I never doubted that Hillary Clinton would deliver a graceful Obama endorsement Tuesday night, yet even I worried a little about Bill Clinton, given the nature of his anger, and anguish, over the rough campaign. But his speech topped his wife's as a passionate statement of the case for Barack Obama. That Obama himself had the courage to let the roll call happen, to give the Clintons their due on two consecutive nights after all the hard feelings during the primaries, and finally to show up at the Pepsi Center Wednesday night to thank them personally -- well, tonight will be a lot of fun, but I saw everything I needed to see Wednesday night to feel like this convention has finally pulled this party together.

Other moments: I loved "Mama Biden," Joe Biden's amazing mother, and Biden himself. It was a moving, overwrought, lovely Biden speech. The Biden-Obama man-hug was great; I even loved Obama's awkward kiss with Jill Biden. He just looked so happy up there he didn't quite know what to do with himself. It's just a great American story, the Obama and Biden families; African-American and Irish Catholic, economic hardship and now, great success; tragedy, loss and triumph; people getting their hearts broken and getting back up again, an ethic of public service and a deep commitment to social justice running through it all. It's still going to be a tough campaign against say-anything John McCain, but where as late as Tuesday I felt this convention lacked a center, on Wednesday it got its groove back. On to Invesco Field, more later tonight.

Reuters/Larry Downing

All day long the cable talkers had their Clinton drama story line down: When Hillary Clinton pointedly asked her Obama-resistant admirers Tuesday night, "Were you in it just for me?" she was also talking to her husband.

Barely hours after Sen. Clinton got her media critics to sheath their knives with a stunning speech endorsing Barack Obama Tuesday night, critics had a new but depressingly familiar story line: President Bill Clinton would never match his wife's enthusiastic backing of her former rival -- and if he didn't, her efforts to heal the party would be diminished. It was clear all day Wednesday that pretty much no matter what Bill Clinton said, the supposedly sulking former president could never be gracious enough, even after his wife moved to nominate Obama by acclamation partway through the roll call a few hours before he spoke. For the second night in a row, then, one of the Clintons had been assigned an impossible task, with lots of risk for failure but little reward even for doing it right.

But now the cable doomsayers are 0 for 2 with their hand-wringing Clinton predictions. MSNBC's Chuck Todd had earlier reported some Democrats' worries that Clinton might face boos -- worries that seemed particularly ludicrous once wild cheering and frenzied flag waving erupted when Clinton took the podium at 7 p.m. sharp. He tried to quiet the crowd with "thank yous," but they just got crazier, giving him a much longer and louder welcome than his wife.

"I love this, and I thank you," he told the crowd, "but we got important work to do tonight." Like his wife on Tuesday, he wasted no time doing what he came to do: "I'm here, first, to support Barack Obama. And second, I'm here to warm up the crowd for Joe Biden. I looooooooove Joe Biden, and America will too."

Clinton took a short and probably earned detour back through the primary campaign, which he noted "generated so much heat, it increased global warming." He then praised his wife: "I'm really proud of the campaign she ran; proud that she never quit on the people she stood up for." But then he got back to his point. "Hillary told us in no uncertain terms that she'll do everything she can to elect Barack Obama. And that makes two of us. Actually, that makes 18 million of us, because, like Hillary, I want all of you who supported her to vote for Barack Obama in November. Here's why."

Like his wife the night before, Clinton rolled through the litany of problems facing the country, including "foreign policy and national security challenges" he said Obama was ready to face. Clinton went even farther than his wife in pronouncing Obama ready for those military challenges, though the quibblers -- and the McCain campaign -- may find one section to parse, when Clinton seemed to suggest Obama needed Biden's foreign policy experience behind him. "With Joe Biden's experience and wisdom, supporting Barack Obama's proven understanding, insight and good instincts, America will have the national security leadership we need."

But he quickly followed up with the most stirring endorsement either Clinton has delivered: "Barack Obama is ready to lead America and restore American leadership in the world. Ready to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. Barack Obama is ready to be president of the United States."

Clinton also helped Obama by delivering a speech that ought to help the party realize that a stirring, partisan, activist economic message is its big winner this year. Leading off by arguing, to wild applause, that "people have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power," he pointed to "the example the Republicans have set," and zeroed in on declining wages despite higher productivity, healthcare troubles, rising poverty and income inequality. He got one of his biggest hands by blasting "the assault on unions." He concluded: "America can do better than that -- and Barack Obama will."

Finally he did what many strategists have urged Obama to do: He pointed to similarities between the Democratic candidate in 2008 and 1992. "The Republicans said I was too young and too inexperienced to be commander in chief. Sound familiar? It didn't work in 1992, because we were on the right side of history, and it will not work in 2008 because Barack Obama is on the right side of history." He closed with a call "to join me, Hillary and Chelsea in making Senator Barack Obama the next president of the United States," and the crowd went wild again.

To be fair, it wasn't as if the cable grumblers had nothing to worry about. The strain and tension among some in the Clinton camp was palpable. Late Tuesday night I collided with a drained and exhausted Clinton intimate leaving the Pepsi Center, who asked, half-proud, half-saddened: "Wasn't she great? She did everything she had to do. And now he has to do it all again tomorrow night."

The Obama campaign and convention organizers didn't do much to make it easy for Clinton. He had to follow his former friend Rep. Jim Clyburn on the podium by about an hour; a nice word from Clyburn about the Clintons would have gone a long way to healing the rift that emerged in primary season when Clyburn began suggesting that both Clintons' attacks on Barack Obama could be seen as racially insensitive. Clyburn failed to mention either Clinton. He spoke in the same hour as former friend Gov. Bill Richardson, who watched the Super Bowl with his buddy, reportedly promised not to endorse Obama, and then reneged.

But Clinton was warmly introduced by Rep. Kendrick Meek, an African-American from South Florida, perhaps in an effort to chase the unfair sting of racism charges. Meek called him "one of the greatest presidents of the United States of America" and said he showed the nation "what America can accomplish when a Democrat is in the White House is a wonderful thing": Lowest unemployment rate in 40 years; poverty rate 20 years; crime rate 27 years, all while inheriting a deficit and leaving a record surplus. Then Clinton took the podium and made those memories real. He left the stage to U2's "Beautiful Day," which then strangely segued into Robert Palmer's "Addicted to Love" -- although the band cut off the refrain but the crowd shouted out the line they dropped: "You might as well face that you're addicted to love." A reference to the former president's love life, or rank and file Democrats' love for Clinton? Whatever, the night made clear that the party isn't ashamed of its only two-term president in modern history, no matter what you hear from cable pundits and bloggers daily -- and that's good news not only for Bill Clinton, but for Barack Obama.

I made the mistake of reading Michelle Obama's speech Monday night before she delivered it. (Rebecca Traister writes it up perfectly here.) I shrugged at the competent but less than inspiring prose, and winced a little at the campaign's obvious effort to domesticate her, to take a smart, funny lawyer-activist who's also a loving wife and mom and all but erase the public person.

Then I watched the smart, funny lawyer-activist and loving wife and mom pour herself into that speech, and I was incredibly impressed, and moved. I can't imagine the pressure Michelle Obama was under, having seen the way a less than perfectly placed adverb -- "for the first time in my adult life I am really proud of my country" -- and other inflections could define her as unpatriotic and ungrateful. There were so many ways to screw up last night, I was nervous for her -- until she started speaking.

The way she delivered the speech made the words all hers. She radiated a deep love -- for Barack Obama, her late father, her brother, her mother and of course those astonishing daughters, but also for the country. She spoke with a calm passion and conviction that were incredibly effective. We even saw a glimpse of the feisty Michelle when a little anger crept into her voice as she talked about military families "with an empty seat at the dinner table." I could only see her from behind from the media space at the Pepsi Center, but I loved the shots of her mother, Marion, while she spoke, and also the cutaways to Joe Biden, just beaming like a proud uncle. When Michelle's daughters joined her onstage and Barack showed up on the video screen, it was all over -- in a good way.

Of course, part of me hates it that Michelle Obama, and the Obama family, have to work so hard to seem like one of us. Some of the problem is race; a lot of it is the McCain campaign's nasty campaign to turn them into otherworldly celebrities. One of my favorite buttons, sported mainly by middle-aged black women here in Denver, is a photo of Barack, Michelle, Sasha and Malia with the caption: "America's Next First Family." The image is hokey and also kind of heartbreaking. The truth is, Michelle Obama does have to work hard to make some voters comfortable with the image on that button; the good news is, she's doing the work.

I shared the desire of many Democrats for a more aggressive and exciting opening night, though I was moved to see Ted Kennedy. If not for all the lingering psychodrama, I'd have had Bill Clinton, not poor Claire McCaskill, warm up the crowd for Michelle Obama. Yes, you read that right: Bill Clinton. But we won't dwell there. Michelle Obama did exactly what she needed to do, but the rest of the agenda at the Pepsi Center did not. I'm looking forward to Hillary Clinton and Mark Warner getting it right Tuesday night.