Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee plays the guitar with his band, Capitol Offense, at a party during the RNC-week festivities.

Alyssa Caplan
AC360° Staffer

It’s felt a little quiet at 360° the last couple of days. Not that it’s actually quiet. It’s just that there’s been so much noise the last couple of weeks, comparatively, it seems quiet.

As I sit at my desk, I wonder if, like me, journalists, politicians, and other conventioneers in offices across the country are looking longingly at the business cards they collected over the last couple of weeks, while pulling rogue streamers and pieces of confetti out of their pockets, muttering to themselves, “the party is over.”

The weird thing is, for anyone who worked at the conventions, (or even made a sport out of watching them and history in the making), it certainly wasn’t all fun and games. It was endless days, swollen feet, hoarse voices, looming fears of hurricanes, and weight gains or losses (depending upon stress coping style). I myself wasn’t technically working at the conventions, but used the time off as a sort of summer enrichment project. Some people follow Phish, I spent the last couple of weeks making my way from the DNC in Denver to the RNC in Minneapolis.

So while I figuratively pick the last flecks of glitter out of my hair, my thoughts turn to some of the characters I met along the way, some of the things my eyes saw…

Keep reading

Delegates look up as the balloons fall after Republican presidential nominee John McCain concluded his speech at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, Thursday.

Ismael Estrada
AC360° Producer

We have been on quite the adventure tour the past couple of weeks…all to talk with you, the voters, all over the country. What seems like forever ago, we started our travels in Encinitas, CA where we watched the DNC with some senior citizens.

We moved on to Arizona to talk with Latinos and on to Louisiana to talk with young professionals. It was a mad scurry to a sporting goods store to pick up rain gear when we stopped for a few days in New Orleans to get nice and wet while covering Hurricane Gustav.

We then we packed up the cars and drove to Florida to kick back up our voter tours. It was in Pensacola that we talked with conservative evangelical Christians and hopped another flight up to Virginia to talk with women.

It’s been fun talking with voters to get a real sense of what our country’s voters are thinking. We chatted with so many great people while watching the conventions and dining over everything from fish tacos to gumbo to burgers.

We watched reactions to Obama’s acceptance speech, to the selection of Gov. Sarah Palin and McCain’s performance last night. The opinions were very interesting, some very passionate, many still undecided.

We are now sitting in a hotel putting together our stories on how evangelical Christians and women reacted to the conventions which you will see tonight.

Joe Johns
AC360° Correspondent

Wanted to send a quick note about the lines outside of INVESCO field:

There actually appear to be a couple lines leading in different directions.

The line we walked has got to be a couple miles long up to this point. Some police told us it is six miles long, but It snakes and undulates, making it quite difficult to judge.

It moves rapidly across the Auraria Blvd overpass then slows down once u get to the other side,
Just a continuous stream of people walking across a bridge on the boulevard near here
From the way they are dressed really a collection of every type of person…

From working class people in blue collar uniforms to men in suits and women in high heels.
It’s warm out and people who aren’t in the greatest shape are naturally huffing and puffing a bit.

I talked to one guy who said this is a little like getting to the Super Bowl… Which seems about right because that is another national ‘special security event‘ like the conventions.

Take a look at some of these photos:

__________

__________

__________

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama makes a surprise appearance at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Wednesday.

Candy Crowley | Bio
AC360° Contributor
CNN Senior Political Correspondent

Editor’s Note: Candy spoke with Wolf Blitzer last night after Barack Obama was declared the Democratic Party’s Presidential Candidate. Here’s what she had to say:

One quick story: We were down in Mississippi at one point at Jackson State University, I think, and we were doing our live shots and there were guards all around and local police. And there was one local policeman stationed right where we were and so I was talking to him and he was from Jackson. And I said, you know, have you ever heard (Barack Obama) speak before?

And he said no. And I said well this will be exciting. And he said oh, well I have to — I’m working, you know. But I’ve seen him on TV. And about halfway through Obama’s speech, I looked over at this guard and saw tears just streaming down his face.

So you saw that a lot… and you knew what a sense of history and how important this really was, in particular, to African-Americans.

But I will also tell you that Obama tends to draw very diverse crowds. And I would say — ask white people in the crowd, what do you like about him? And they generally said well, he’s against the war or I like this or that plan. But the second thing they almost always said to me invariably was, I think it would say so much about our country if we nominated a half-black, half-white man. I think it would say how much we’ve progressed over the years.

So you always got that sense of history when you were traveling with Obama, from the very first day that I was with him in Springfield, Illinois, when he announced. You would ask people, what are you doing here? Because it was freezing. And there were just blocks and blocks and blocks of people.

You’d say, why are you here?
Keep reading

Leslie Sanchez | Bio
CNN Political Contributor
Republican Strategist

Once again, the Democrats shoot themselves in the foot. In a half-baked effort to establish “unity” within their own ranks, they haul out Bill and Hillary Clinton - probably the only two people in politics who can, by their mere presence, unite Republicans.

Bill Clinton gave a slick speech tonight. His wife couldn’t bring herself to say that Barack Obama is ready to be President, so Bill overcompensated: he said “ready” so much, you’d think he was trying to convince himself.

But with Bill Clinton, the question always is, “is he lying now, or was he lying before?” All through the Primaries, Bill went around the country telling everybody who’d listen that Obama is ill-prepared for the White House. Which is it then?

I especially liked the point in the speech when Clinton recalled how, in his 1992 run, his opponents charged that he was too inexperienced for the nation’s highest office.

They were right. Bill’s first two years in office were such a disaster - careening from crisis to crisis - that by 1994, Americans were so disgusted that they elected Republicans to a majority in both Houses of Congress for the first time in more than 4O years.

Bill Clinton wasn’t ready then, and Barack Obama is not ready now. America can’t go through another two years like we sustained while Bill Clinton was riding around with training wheels.

CNNs Jeanne Moos encourages you to analyze the dance moves of poltical pundits at the Democratic National Convention

We’ve been working hard this week at the DNC, but with work comes a time to let loose. Roland Martin and Donna Brazile did the best job, dancing in the middle of the CNN Grill long after they went off the air. Since we didn’t have a camera able to tape it, you should check out Jeanne Moos’ report on all the convention dancing. You will get a good idea of what went down here last night.

It was a really interesting mix of people here, from Colorado Governor Bill Ritter’s sons, August and Abe, to Ashley Judd, Jamie Foxx and Days of Our Lives’ own Deidre Hall. Time’s Karen Tumulty, ABC’s Kate Snow, EXTRA’s Carlos Diaz and our own Campbell Brown, Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper were spotted at various times throughout the night chatting up the various guests here. Speaker Nancy Pelosi made her way in for an interview and her staff wanted to come back. She, unfortunately, couldn’t make it due to other commitments. But Rep. Gary Ackerman of New York did make it, and he and his wife really enjoyed dinner as well as the atmosphere.

Keep reading

Jeffrey Toobin | Bio
CNN Senior Political Analyst

Conventions are about politics, not policies, so it’s not surprising that we’ve lately been preoccupied with Hillary Clinton’s body language and John McCain’s real estate.

But it seems timely to offer a reminder that this election is really about something — about issues that will affect the lives of every American and, most likely, everyone in the world.

Presidential candidates are cagey about specifics, so here’s some informed speculation about how the world might look differently if McCain or Barack Obama wins in November:

Obama has three clear priorities for his presidency. He wants to end the war in Iraq, he wants to undertake a major expansion of guaranteed health care, and he wants to change energy policy to lower our dependence on foreign oil and start to address global warming. Can he do any or all of these?

Read More…

Carl Bernstein
AC360° Contributor

Barack Obama is getting the convention he wants, under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. The convention he is building reflects him and his priorities: it’s thoughtful, not just red-meat; and he’s in surprising control of the message, given the forces he’s dealing with. Indeed, the convention-building and the message may be far more sophisticated and effective than we instant commentators were prepared to discern. Witness the opening night grousing on-air about the convention’s supposed thematic absence, and aversion to instant butchery of the opposition.

Task Number One for Obama:
Defining himself as a person, not just a politician: telling his story and that of Michelle Obama and their family. An American story, meant to definitively undermine the oppo-narrative of the Clinton campaign, and now the Republican oppo-narrative – that he is some kind of vaguely alien, exotic candidate. (For some undecided voters, that also means uncomfortably black). Michelle Obama – as well as the team that produced her bio-pic – delivered with perfect pitch on Night One.

This was the real opening business of the convention, the essential themes to get right. As well as to establish an umbilical connection between Obama and the greatest of Democratic traditions and immutable principles… a generational passing of the torch that Caroline and Ted Kennedy declared unmistakably – and emotionally – had now moved past the Clintons.

Keep reading

Faye Wattleton
AC360° Contributor
President, Center for the Advancement of Women

What if, throughout her campaign for the party’s nomination, Sen. Hillary Clinton had made speeches like the one she gave last night at the Democratic National Convention? It’s possible that she’d be the candidate accepting the party’s nomination tomorrow at Invesco Field. What type of presidency would she have led, had she become the first woman president of the United States? We’ll have to leave that question unanswered, at least for now.

The expectations that were placed on Sen. Clinton to mend the great divide that emerged from the Democratic primaries were both unprecedented and unrealistic. Yet, she delivered beyond our imagination last night. She repeatedly endorsed Sen. Barack Obama. She covered all of the points the party could have wished for. She asked the delegates –and all Democrats watching at home– to re-assess the values and motivations that brought them to Denver and will now determine their chances for putting a Democrat in the White House.

In the same way she rose gracefully from the Lewinsky affair and from a defeated campaign to overhaul the nation’s healthcare system, Sen. Clinton emerged last night as a polished diamond. She surfaced as an unalloyed leader out of the adversities and the unaddressed sexism endured during her campaign and, for that matter, during her entire political career. Her journey is emblematic of the way American women overcome the challenges posed by a society where full-equality is yet to be attained.

Sen. Clinton raised the bar to the “what if, and every decision the Obama campaign makes from now on will be measured against it. Regardless of whether she united the party last night, Sen. Obama will have to show voters how their lives will be better if they vote, in unity, for him. How he chooses to translate the rhetoric of change into the policy of change will be essential as he aims at locking the support of independents and die-hard Clinton supporters, especially the women in the 25 percent who now plan to support Sen. John McCain.

The ball is in Sen. Obama’s court.

Hilary Rosen
AC360° Contributor
Political Director, The Huffington Post

Editor’s note: CNN contributor Hilary Rosen is the political director and Washington editor at large of HuffingtonPost.com, which describes itself as an Internet newspaper and focuses on politics from a liberal point of view. A longtime Democratic adviser, Rosen is a former CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America. This column by Rosen, a former Clinton supporter, is one of a series of commentary pieces on CNN.com from Democrats and Republicans attending party conventions.

Is there a score higher than an A+? I have heard about a hundred speeches by Sen. Hillary Clinton. Tuesday night’s speech in Denver was a clarion call filled with power and grace.

Hillary’s job at the Democratic National Convention was a big one. She had to make a strong and compelling case to any of her recalcitrant supporters for the election of Sen. Barack Obama.

She had to express her deep appreciation for all those who supported her in this campaign but not too much appreciation so that people would think she was trying to keep them to herself.

And finally she had to describe the stakes in this election and the choices we face, particularly for American families. But she had do it in a way that was not threatening to Obama but rather would be seen as amplifying his message.

And she had to do it all in 23 minutes (including applause). For weeks, people will make comments about what she should have or shouldn’t have said.

But Tuesday night she was strong and compassionate, comforting and combative, deeply intelligent and extremely charming. She did everything she needed to achieve for a united party and a dignified conclusion to her campaign for her supporters. I think she gave the speech of her life.

Clinton’s journey broke barriers on several levels. Yet it also gave us some real insights about the road ahead. We cannot try to replicate how men got ahead in politics, but must be open and heartfelt about the special qualities that we as women bring to public office.

Yes, it is true, she not so silently admitted, that in the beginning she was trying to avoid running as a “woman.” She thought she needed to prove she was commander-in-chief material. But instead in the last and more successful months of her campaign, her message evolved.

Read more…