Two quick observations about Bill Clinton's speech. First, unless we are mistaken, he was the first speaker to explicitly mention the historic nature of Barack Obama's accomplishment as the first African American nominated by a major party. Second, he ended his speech -- as he did in 1992 -- by asking us to believe in a place called Hope. Ralph Waldo Emerson observed that the world has always been divided between the party of memory and the party of hope. Obama knows, as Clinton did, that Democrats win elections as the party of hope.
--Robert Gordon and James Kvaal