The Green Turtle restaurant in Columbia usually rocks with the sound of the Ravens games, as it did Thursday night. But at one end of the big sports bar and grill, a noisy crowd of more than a hundred Democrats was hooting and hollering over the team action at the home field of the Denver Broncos.
The crowd watching the television screens was completely in synch with the massed Democrats listening to Barack Obama at Invesco Field, and was just as diverse, from young African American professionals to white-haired veterans of many a liberal campaign.
No cues were needed for Obama’s applause lines, and when the candidate dredged up the remark by a McCain adviser about being “a nation of whiners,” the boos were as spontaneous as the cheers were for the reference to Hillary Clinton. They relished Obama’s sarcastic digs at the Republican nominee, such as: “I don’t think he doesn’t care” about the plight of the middle class. “He just doesn’t know.”
The event was staged with minimal publicity by the local Obama campaign and Howard County Council member Calvin Ball, a young African American and former community organizer who’s been on board the Obama train its entire 19 months.
The typically ebullient councilman was wowed by the size and enthusiasm of the local crowd for Obama’s night. “It exceeded my expectations,” he said.
Ball said he had no doubts Obama could pull it off in November: “I think we can do it.”
Can You Top This?
Caught up in the hoopla of the final night of the Democratic Convention, you had to wonder: How can John McCain top this?
Then along comes Sarah Palin, surely a stumper in any trivia quiz. Who is she? Or who is the governor of Alaska? McCain, who’s become rather predictable lately, still has the ability to surprise with unconventional decisions, not bad for a guy on his 72nd birthday.
Don Murphy, longtime McCain backer and chair of the Maryland delegation to the Republican convention in St. Paul, watched Friday’s announcement with the members of the rules committee. “Everybody went nuts,” Murphy said. “There seems to be common agreement that this was a brilliant choice,” though supporters of Mitt Romney may take a while to come around.
“I’m ecstatic,” said Murphy, a maverick Republican like the candidate he supports. As much he would tell his 19-year-old daughter “you can be anything you want to be, it sort of rang hollow,” he said. Now it doesn’t.
“I had secretly wished” for the choice of Palin, Murphy said. He disagreed with the notion that she undermined the argument against Obama’s inexperience. “I see her as being more experienced in the way that a commander-in-chief needs to be — executive experience. It’s a much more balanced ticket,” he said. Plus, “I think we’ve reached out to disaffected Hillary supporters.”
How tweet it was
Gov. Martin O’Malley may have put out 39 “tweets” — postings on Twitter – during the convention, but most were fairly sanitized. “Huge speech from Bill Clinton has got the crowd on their feet again and again with stinging attacks on our opponents,” O’Malley twittered Wednesday night. The postings, limited to merely 140 characters, also had you begging for more information: “I just spoke to Senator Obama,” the governor said earlier Wednesday. “I told him that we [are] ready and willing to do whatever it takes to put him in the whitehouse.” [sic]
The multiple blogs from O’Malley, Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown and Comptroller Peter Franchot on their own Web sites and several people – mostly communications director David Paulson — on the Maryland Democratic Party site generated practically no “comments” – the interactive exchanges that help make blogs such a potent communications tool and drive people to Web sites.
Yet, for all their safe political rhetoric, there was real can’t-find-it-anywhere-else tidbits, such as the video snippet of Democratic Party chair Michael Cryor addressing the delegates at Thursday’s breakfast.
“As proud as we are for the role and significance of Barack … we must also feel the disappointment that women feel for Hillary Clinton,” Cryor said. “That joy that we feel is the pain that many supporters of Sen. Clinton feel.”
“We have to make inclusiveness real,” the chairman concluded. “We have to admit that we’ve taken women for granted in our party.”
