Hillary Clinton good enough

Hillary Clinton's convention speech was more about demonstrating that she was the person multiple convention speakers said she was -- caring, committed, tenacious, tough, smart (or, in Michael Bloomberg's oddly effective down-shift, "sane, competent") -- than setting off fireworks. She succeeded in that. She spoke deliberately and with conviction about her agenda, her experience, her commitment, and the danger manifest in Trump.

The idea was to have the cumulative effect of many congruent messages culminate in her person. For me, previous testimonies that moved my personal needle converged in one part of her speech.

Through the convention's four days, I had been most impressed by private citizens and local officials who testified to Clinton's caring and persistence. They included 9/11 survivor Loren Manning, who suffered burns across most of her body:

MIchelle brings Obama's story home

In his bid to move the political center back to the left in the wake of the Reagan revolution, Obama has always relied on an idealized abstract of American history, casting it as a story of ever-expanding commitment to shared prosperity -- prosperity shared ever more widely.  It's an oral slideshow, a series of historical tableaus delivered with incantatory parallel phrasing and refrain. In his speech on election night 2008, for example, he invoked a 106 year-old African American voter as a witness to the panorama:

She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people that "We Shall Overcome." Yes we can.

A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination. And this year, in this election, she touched her finger to a screen, and cast her vote, because after 106 years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change. Yes we can.

Toward the end of her speech tonight, Michelle Obama deployed the same kind of narrative, with the same political message: