Kerry, this time with feeling

When John Kerry got up there to speak with his insomnia-curing drawl, I thought I’d watch the old loser just from a sense of schadenfreude. But then his attack came out. It was interesting, potent and it had Michelle Obama rising to her feet. In fact, it struck me as the punchiest, hardest-hitting speech of the convention.

Who would have thought that dull old Kerry had it in him? He found a nice way of dealing with the Democrats key problem. McCain is – in Clinton’s own words – “a good man who loves his country.” But Kerry separated “Senator McCain” from “Candidate McCain” saying he’d mutated into a tool of the Republican party. He listed examples: “Candidate McCain now supports the wartime tax cuts that Senator McCain once denounced as immoral. Candidate McCain criticises Senator McCain's own climate change bill. Candidate McCain says he would now vote against the immigration bill that Senator McCain wrote. Are you kidding? Talk about being for it before you're against it.” Kerry earned extra marks from me for that self-deprecating final line.

Being a flip-flopper was his main defect in the last campaign, embodied by that immortal line “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it”. Kerry also took the attack to McCain on National Security. “When John McCain stood on the deck of an aircraft carrier just three months after 9/11 and proclaimed, "Next up, Baghdad!", Barack Obama saw, even then, "an occupation of "undetermined length, undetermined cost, undetermined consequences" that would "only fan the flames of the Middle East." I don’t agree with Kerry for a minute, but it’s the kind of attack that Obama has so far shown himself incapable of. I suspect we’ll hear more of this from Biden, who’s about to talk.

PS Perhaps the most sincere complement Bill Clinton paid to Joe Biden was nicking his quotes. Perhaps the most memorable quote from Clinton’s speech was that “People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power.” That one was heard at the Boston 2004 conference from one Joe Biden. PPS Michelle Obama has been unusually animated today, perhaps realising how much the cameras caught her scowling solidly at Hillary yesterday.