In a post in this space on Thursday, Vincent Rossmeier noted a report that there's been discussion inside the White House about possibly canceling President Bush's speech at the Republican convention next week, depending on the turns taken by Tropical Storm Gustav.

Now, the Washington Post is out with an article that takes things one step further -- because of Gustav, the Post says, "Republican officials ... are considering delaying the start of the GOP convention." The Post also has the same report about deliberations inside the White House about whether to cancel Bush's appearance.

As the Post says, there's a very good reason why Republicans would want to avoid holding their convention as a storm batters the U.S.: Hurricane Katrina. Even if it weren't for Katrina and the negative perceptions still attached to the party from the damage it inflicted, holding what is essentially a political party while Americans suffer just doesn't look good.

And there's one other reason a decision to delay the convention might serve John McCain's strategic purposes. Actually, there are two: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Both are scheduled to speak on that first day, and a hurricane-related delay might be just the excuse the McCain camp needs to ensure that the pair doesn't appear without angering the large segment within the Republican Party that still holds the administration in high regard.

DENVER -- John McCain's campaign has released its response to Barack Obama's speech here tonight. The statement, attributed to spokesman Brian Rogers, reads:

Tonight, Americans witnessed a misleading speech that was so fundamentally at odds with the meager record of Barack Obama. When the temple comes down, the fireworks end, and the words are over, the facts remain: Senator Obama still has no record of bipartisanship, still opposes offshore drilling, still voted to raise taxes on those making just $42,000 per year, and still voted against funds for American troops in harm's way. The fact remains: Barack Obama is still not ready to be President.

DENVER -- By the time Barack Obama took the stage to accept the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, so many people had gathered in Denver's Invesco Field that to call the noise the crowd made merely a roar wouldn't do it justice. For those inside the press box, it was as if the crowd was making the stadium itself shake. Eighty-five thousand people gathered to hear Obama speak, one of his spokeswomen told Salon, and he didn't disappoint them.

Those stadium-shaking bursts of enthusiasm had been sweeping through the crowd all night, but the crowd of course saved its loudest cheers for the man they'd come to see. When he came onstage, the crowd erupted. Signs bearing the signature word of Obama's campaign, "Change," went up through the stadium, and the whole place seemed to be filled with waving American flags. Every so often, another rumble built and shook the press box. And just when it seemed the audience might let Obama speak, the familiar chant of "Yes, we can" began, and the stadium seemed to shake again.

Obama, though, was always composed. He remained firmly in control, delivering with his usual command a speech that deftly wrapped the different points he needed to hit into a single coherent narrative.

The newly official nominee's first task was to define himself, not just to humanize himself for those who still fear him but also to fight back against the way he's been defined by his opponent. He did so in the context of what he called "that fundamental promise that has made this country great -- a promise that is the only reason I am standing here tonight." And he illustrated that through the story of his own family and his own life, saying:

[I]n the faces of those young veterans who come back from Iraq and Afghanistan, I see my grandfather, who signed up after Pearl Harbor...

In the face of that young student who sleeps just three hours before working the night shift, I think about my mom, who raised my sister and me on her own while she worked and earned her degree...

When I listen to another worker tell me that his factory has shut down, I remember all those men and women on the South Side of Chicago who I stood by and fought for.

Then, in one of the best lines of his speech, Obama turned those stories back on what has been one of his opponent's most successful lines of attack against him recently. "I don’t know what kind of lives John McCain thinks that celebrities lead, but this has been mine," Obama said.

That was the kind of jab Obama succeeded in landing on McCain several times during the course of the night, lines that hit their intended target with no small force but without making the candidate himself seem angry or negative.

"Now, I don’t believe that Senator McCain doesn't care what’s going on in the lives of Americans. I just think he doesn't know. Why else would he define middle-class as someone making under five million dollars a year?"

"When John McCain said we could just 'muddle through' in Afghanistan, I argued for more resources and more troops... John McCain likes to say that he’ll follow bin Laden to the Gates of Hell -- but he won’t even go to the cave where he lives."

"If John McCain wants to have a debate about who has the temperament, and judgment, to serve as the next Commander-in-Chief, that’s a debate I’m ready to have."

And, taking the opportunity he was granted by having so many eyes upon him, Obama also pushed back against those who have worked to portray him as un-American and un-patriotic. Indeed, this was the central thread that held the speech together. It was a thesis about what Obama called the "promise that has always set this country apart -- that through hard work and sacrifice, each of us can pursue our individual dreams but still come together as one American family."

"That’s why I stand here tonight," Obama told the crowd. "Because for two hundred and thirty two years, at each moment when that promise was in jeopardy, ordinary men and women -- students and soldiers, farmers and teachers, nurses and janitors -- found the courage to keep it alive."

DENVER -- John McCain's campaign was trying to sell the press on the idea that the final night of the Democratic convention was basically one non-stop rock concert, but they're wrong: half the crowd had a suit on, people sat patiently through hours of political speeches in the blazing sun without any sign they were bored waiting for the headliner, and besides, the wave didn't really get started until after Al Gore left the stage. (Yes, that's a joke.)

Despite what Republicans wanted people to believe, Barack Obama's acceptance speech tonight had more or less the same vibe as the first few night's of the convention, just on a bigger scale. Organizers picked up the whole operation from the Pepsi Center and moved it about a mile down the road to Mile High Stadium at Invesco Field. Security perimeters vanished overnight, rebuilt around the football field. Even the carefully organized props the convention officials passed out earlier in the week made the trek -- they distributed American flags of varying sizes for everyone to wave. (Or put on their lapel.) And then before Obama's speech, officials got blue "Change" signs to everyone in the stadium -- all 85,000 or so. Yeah, fine, Stevie Wonder sang, and people got up and danced (but only to his hit "Signed, Sealed & Delivered" -- they stayed seated for the song with "Barack Obama" in the chorus, even with its go-go backbeat). But people danced to Melissa Etheridge, too, back at the basketball arena.

This was not some crowd gathered to see what kind of train wreck Britney Spears has turned into, or gawking at someone they only know from MTV; it was a political rally, the same as anything McCain might speak at. (Only with far, far more people there.) What the speech helped show was the cheap shot behind the "celebrity" charges the GOP has been hurling, with some effectiveness, at Obama all summer. McCain isn't exactly some unknown policy wonk toiling away in the Russell Senate Office building, unrecognized by the tourists passing by -- eight years ago, he was the Republican Obama, the insurgent reformer with the exciting brand, and if Obama is a celebrity, McCain is, too.

The Denver fire marshal locked the building down, as the crowd strained its 84,000-person capacity. And most of the people here were voters, many from Colorado, a battleground state. The campaign encouraged them to send text messages all night -- building up its database for the fall -- and collected information from them on their way in. And it had them work phone banks in the hallways all afternoon. Obama's speech, actually, was more than a political rally -- it was also the largest field office in the history of campaigns. Just a day after Obama filled a football mega-stadium, McCain will hold a rally in Dayton, Ohio, to announce his vice presidential pick. His campaign can barely give tickets away. Maybe the lasting message Democrats should take from the speech Thursday night was this: when Obama gathered 84,000 people to hear him in Denver, they weren't fans. They were supporters. And if things break Obama's way, McCain might soon find that the reason his crowds aren't as big is because he doesn't have as many of them.

DENVER -- If you didn't know better, you might, for a minute, have thought that it was Al Gore who was here at Invesco Field to accept the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, so loud was the roar that greeted him when he took the stage.

The former vice president made the best of his defeat at the hands of George W. Bush eight years ago in making the case for Barack Obama.

»Continued

DENVER -- We're still a couple of hours away from the speech in which Barack Obama will officially accept the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, but excerpts of his address have been released. In it, Obama speaks of the American dream, the "fundamental promise that has made this country great," saying that "promise has been threatened" during the Bush administration.

The portions of Obama's speech that have been released thus far can be read below.

Four years ago, I stood before you and told you my story -- of the brief union between a young man from Kenya and a young woman from Kansas who weren't well-off or well-known, but shared a belief that in America, their son could achieve whatever he put his mind to.

»Continued

― Alex Koppelman

DENVER -- In his latest ad, John McCain appears to be taking the high road. Looking directly into the camera, the presumptive Republican nominee doesn't attack his opponent -- instead, he congratulates him, saying:

Senator Obama: This is truly a good day for America. All too often the achievements of our opponents go unnoticed. So I wanted to stop and say congratulations. How perfect that your nomination would come on this historic day. Tomorrow we'll be back at it, but tonight, Senator, job well done.

The ad closes with -- ironically, given the McCain camp's frequent line of attack against Obama -- an image of McCain smiling beatifically at his audience, looking so pure and sweet you might swear there was a halo around his head.

But this ad is not nearly as free of politics as it seems. In fact, it's just another part of the work the McCain camp has been doing over the past couple of days to take some of the attention from Obama on his big night here at Denver's Invesco Field. Before the spot hit the Internet on Thursday afternoon, the McCain camp spent the morning hyping it up, getting the media talking about what might be coming. And then there's the leak campaign designed to advertise a future leak campaign -- the McCain camp has been dropping serious hints that the name of the Arizona senator's running mate will be slipping out tonight, even though the actual roll-out isn't until tomorrow.

So "Jerry Springer" it's not, but MSNBC's coverage of the Democratic convention has often seemed a lot like one of Springer's old-time episodes of hair-pulling, shirt-ripping, expletive-dropping, diaper-wearing transvestites and the women who love them fun.

OK, that's an exaggeration. But the recent, widely publicized on-air disputes among MSNBC's anchors are grabbing headlines.

Let's start at the beginning. Huffington Post has compiled a handy round-by-round guide of the pundit bouts, the first of which occurred Monday when Keith Olbermann derisively told conservative Joe Scarborough to "get a shovel" after Scarborough claimed presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain was gaining in national polls.

Then came perhaps the biggest blowup of the entire week, a nearly 10-minute exchange Tuesday during which Scarborough and David Shuster yelled back and forth. Scarborough concluded the discussion by calling Shuster "Rip Van Shuster" and saying, "Shuster, I have no idea what you're talking about ... Have you been sleeping the past couple months? ... Do you never watch this show? ... You usually sleep through this show because you didn't show up three times in a row ... Somebody got into some bad acid at the protests and this conversation turned terribly wrong."

Not to be outdone, Chris Matthews then got into the act Tuesday. While House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer waited to be interviewed, first Matthews yelled to someone off-camera that he would "wrap in a second." Then, after Olbermann introduced Hoyer, Matthews went after his coanchor, saying, "You made that sound, Keith. I can do the same to you. That's what I thought and I said it."

Finally (at least for now), Wednesday night, after Republican pundit Mike Murphy opined that he believed Hillary Clinton would vote for John McCain, Olbermann said loudly, "Let's wrap him up, all right?"

Add to these incidents MSNBC's horrible decision to position its outdoor set in front of Denver's Union Station, so that both train whistles and screaming protesters frequently interrupt its broadcasts, and you have a television meltdown on your hands. And it comes at an awful time -- right in the middle of one of the network's most important spans of coverage for the entire year.

The Politico and the Wall Street Journal have documented the on-air grudge matches in articles over the past two days. The Politico quotes an anonymous "high-ranking MSNBC journalist" as saying, "The situation at our channel is about to blow up." And the Wall Street Journal quotes former MSNBC host and "CBS Evening News" coanchor Connie Chung, who said, "My reaction to that is: 'Grow up!' They have to just grow up."

Despite all the attention the spats have received in the media, however, MSNBC president Phil Griffin doesn't seem worried. "Look, I want honest, authentic people on our air. I don't want phonies. So if the price of that is every once in a while one of these bubbles up, I'm not concerned," he told the Wall Street Journal. And Griffin told the Politico that "this is our team. They've served us well. We love 'em, and we're going to be at the Republican convention, and it's going to be great. And I don't have any hesitation."

And what about MSNBC's ratings? While it has improved on the ratings front during the convention, it still trails CNN and Fox News overall for convention coverage.

Clips of all four of the interactions can be viewed below.

The polls have been looking pretty good for John McCain in recent weeks, but now there's word his support is softening among a key constituency: His in-laws.

Cindy McCain's half sister, Kathleen Hensley Portalski, told Us magazine she's voting for Obama. "I think his proposals to improve the country are more positive and I'm not a big war believer," Portalski said.

Portalski, 65, and Cindy McCain, 54, are not exactly chummy. Portalski told Us that Cindy is cool and standoffish. She was also sore that McCain was featured in an NPR story earlier this month as an "only child." Portalski and McCain share the same father, Jim Hensley, the founder of beer distributor Hensley and Co., which is the source of much of Cindy McCain's wealth. Interestingly, according to NPR, while Hensley provided financial support to Portalski and her children over the years, he willed his entire estate to Cindy. Portalski was left with $10,000.

For someone from the party of "family values," McCain's sure having trouble rounding up the votes of his relatives. Us also reports that Portalski's son, Nathan, plans to back Obama as well. Nathan had some harsh words for both McCains.

"I wouldn't vote for John McCain if he was a Democrat," he said. "I would not vote at all before I'd vote for him." He went on: "I question whether Cindy is someone I'd want to see in the White House as first lady."

DENVER -- Anyone seeking stealth inspiration and a bit of political passion, not to mention a dose of intellect that makes Barack Obama sound like Dan Quayle would have been very lucky, as Salon was, to stumble upon an appearance here by Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, N.J.

Booker was speaking at an event held by Vote Hope, a PAC founded to help elect Barack Obama president that's now broadening to create an infrastructure that will help propel more minority candidates to elected office. Booker, a charismatic 39-year-old, was introduced by Vote Hope founder Steve Phillips as "the next Barack Obama," even as he was running -- literally -- into the banquet hall.

Once he caught his breath, Booker began a speech that served as an introduction to his unusual story: After playing football at Stanford and attending Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, he arrived in drug- and crime-addled Newark as what he called "an arrogant Yale law student" who chose to live on what he called "a challenged block." After winning an upset victory to become a Newark city councilman, Booker was not the most popular guy on that block, or with Newark's long entrenched and corrupt city government, and told of having his car ticketed and his employees going unpaid.

Booker described his early political life, during which he'd promised his supporters hope and change that he wasn't sure how to deliver, in terms that must have resonated with convention guests here to nominate Obama for president. "I had these people who believed in me so much," Booker said. But as a 20-something kid, he said, he didn't know exactly how to fulfill their expectations. "Every time I'd come to a point where I'd begin to indulge in what I should not be indulging in -- cynicism or skepticism or doubt," he said, a host of elder colleagues "would smack me upside the head."

In a desperate bid to draw attention to the open-air drug trade on his corner, Booker staged a 10-day hunger strike, sleeping in a tent on his corner in a protest that made headlines and brought supporters to join him. "My very cynical friends said it was the only way I could get anyone to sleep with me," he joked.

Booker's self-introduction touched on many of the quirks that have made him a press darling and a rising star in East Coast (and now national) politics. "I have always loved manifestations of faith," he said, noting that he'd traveled to ashrams in India, and that he was "the only goy head of the L'Chaim Society at Oxford," which is true.

Like Obama, Booker is a rare politician: unwilling to dumb himself down, and in fact eager to let his brains hang out. And, as with Obama, politically and culturally sophisticated audiences -- like the crowd gathered for Vote Hope -- cannot get enough of him. His 20-minute address included references to Langston Hughes, Golda Meir and Martin Luther King Jr., and a remarkable recitation (he said he was paraphrasing, but it sounded right on) of most of the last two pages of James Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time," pages he called his favorite passage of literature, one that he said unlocked "the very secret and power of our country." It's the passage that goes, "One is, after all, emboldened by the spectacle of human history in general, and American Negro history in particular, for it testifies to nothing less than the perpetual achievement of the impossible."

Booker concluded with his own exhortation, saying that "the work of our ancestors is not done. We must now pay the price and make the sacrifices they made so that our children may dream again." Drawing on King's famous line that he had seen the glory of the coming of the Lord, Booker said that it is up to us to "prove our ancestors right and make the most daring dreamers feel that they have underestimated our potential."

It is perhaps the greatest testament to the barriers that have begun to fall around us that Booker didn't sound like he was talking about a distant future but, rather, a very near one.