Guest Poster - Michael Webber of Los Angeles

[Michael was among the behind the scenes folks handing out signs for the crowds to wave on Monday night. Here's his tale:]

We have staging crews who set up all the signs. Then we have runners who run the signs from the staging areas to the floor. Then we have visibility whips who take the signs up into the delegations. So I was a runner running signs up and down all over the place. When it came time for Bill Clinton's speech, they needed all hands on deck, so I took the signs, I didn't have a floor pass so I barged out past security with the signs covering my badges so they couldn't tell I didn't have one. And then they said "go to the front" so I pushed through the crowds, which was like a sea of people, all the way to the very front, tried to push the signs out to Iowa and Ohio standing next to Governor Vilsack and was 25 feet from Clinton during his speech. That was the best speech I've seen Clinton give. I've seen him speak a couple times and that was phenomenal. From the floor it felt great because people were quiet and listened. And every other speech they were not, that much I could tell. So they got quiet, because he's got such a commanding presence, everyone hushes up. And he used some great stylistic mechanisms for speaking, some repetitiveness, some themes, "send me, send John Kerry", these things that are easy for us to latch onto. And then he talked about service, he talked about how some people avoided service in Vietnam, including himself, and that self-criticism really made John Kerry stand out. And that worked really well. I spoke to my wife afterwards, who's not a John Kerry fan, and she said that was a great speech. She said "I'm actually a John Kerry fan now." It did what it needed to do, which was take the people who were Anybody But Bush and make them John Kerry fans as well. So I thought it was a powerful speech. And she's probably a typical Democrat in that regard. So he accomplished what he needed to which was to get people excited about Kerry and highlight the differences between Republicans and Democrats. And he did that really well. They love their country, it's just a different world view. Here's their world view, here's our world view. And we have good evidence that our world view is better. And I think that was a pretty simple and clear case that he could make that no one else really could have.