Jay Barth, who is on the scene in Philadelphia for the Democratic National Convention, will have more soon (see his recap of Day One here).  

The view from the teevee seat: I thought that after a wobbly afternoon (and an excruciating few minutes of live television when Al Franken and Sarah Silverman suddenly lost the ability to ad-lib) the Dems did just about as well as they could have hoped in the primetime hours. By the time that Elizabeth Warren spoke, the protests sounded like literally one dude. Michelle Obama gave the best convention speech by my lights since — what? Maybe her husband in 2004? Her frame of thinking of the election from the perspective of a parent (“this election … is about who will have the power to shape our children for the next four or eight years of their lives”) amounted to a gracefully devastating rebuke of Trump and Trumpism. My bet is that this speech (and the ready-for-commercial speech from disability advocate Anastasia Somoza) will prove more durable stories than the raucous chanting from the afternoon crowd. 

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Bernie Sanders gave a thunderous version of his stump speech, urging his supporters to continue to fight for progressive change, noting their success in building a more progressive party platform, and made a detailed and substantive progressive case for the importance of voting for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. And when he made this case — the cheers won out. It was a speech loaded with policy — indeed, any five-minute chunk of his speech had more specific policy ideas than the entirety of the Republican National Convention. 

My read is that Monday felt more like a party working out a family feud than a divorce, and of course the Sanders speech was almost the opposite of the Ted Cruz speech at the RNC. By the end, the Clinton campaign had reason to feel great about the primetime slate of speeches and the Sanders camp had reason to claim victories of their own. The party will be united by Michelle Obama 2024 buttons, if nothing else. 

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