DNC aftermath sidelined by weak jobs numbers in reminder that all is not so happy and energetic as the past week in Charlotte
After the party, the hangover. Just eight hours after Barack Obama made his case for another term in the White House, received with such fervor from the 20,000 Democratic supporters assembled in front of him that it brought back memories of the euphoria of 2008, the latest job figures landed with a thump.
"I won't pretend the path I'm offering is quick or easy; I never have," Obama told the packed arena in Charlotte. The job figures made the same point even more eloquently: fewer than 100,000 jobs created in August when twice as many were needed; jobless rate down to 8.1% but mainly because many Americans have given up the search for work.
If Obama hadn't had an early sighting of the job figures, as some pundits suspected, then he certainly pitched his speech on the assumption they might be bad. It was designed, in its language and theatrics, to be the antidote to the paean to hope and change that a bushy-tailed Obama delivered four years ago. "I was a younger man" then, Obama said almost wistfully.
There was no Greek temple this time, no rallying cry of the "fierce urgency of now", and though he talked about hope he did so apologetically, lamenting that hope had been tested "by one of the worst economic crises in history". He went so far as to say he was "mindful of my own failings" – a stunning admittance from a man famously assured of his own abilities.
None of that seemed to matter for the faithful in the arena, though, who cheered and chanted as though it were early 2008 all over again and the great recession still lay ahead. Even the thousands of supporters who were turned away from the arena after the larger stadium event was cancelled refused to be dampened by disappointment: they screamed at Obama as he was beamed onto screens in front of them in the spill-over ballroom into which they had been relegated.
Conventions are a form of theatre, and in purely thespian terms Obama won the battle hands down. His performance on Thursday night resonated with committed Democrats on a level that Mitt Romney could only dream of. Republican delegates assembled in Tampa the previous week were notably muted by comparison.
This was partly a simple reflection of the audience itself: hardcore Democrats remain far more enamoured of Obama than the conservative base is of Romney. And Obama had a Tony award-winning supporting cast in Michelle, who played the emoting wife more convincingly than her first lady challenger Ann Romney, and Bill Clinton, who once again proved himself to be the Laurence Olivier of political soliloquizing.
But running for the presidency is not just about stagecraft, even in the era of the TV soundbite. Outside the bubble of the convention centers in Charlotte and Tampa, away from the auto-cues and the flag waving, there are millions of Americans out of work and millions more anxious that they could lose their jobs.
Which is why, for all the razmattazz and barnstorming inside the arena, outside it the 2012 election remains an ugly affair, fought through teeth and nail and certain to be agonisingly close to the bitter end. The latest polls put the two candidates as essentially tied at around 48%.
Delegates from the key battleground states where the election will be won or lost – Colorado, Iowa, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio and Virginia – are fully aware that the made-for-camera stardust of the conventions has nothing to do with the real-life struggles they are fighting on the ground.
Every morning this week Democratic volunteers from each of the 50 states have been coming together in their own gatherings to discuss not high-falutin political rhetoric or the ubiquitous convention lip service paid to the American dream, but the brass tacks of how to win on 6 November.
Take the breakfast held at 7.30am by the Ohio delegation in a hotel room 10 miles outside Charlotte. The coffee was bitter, the bacon burnt and the eggs cooked to the consistency of a bouncy ball, but the conversation was serious and the atmosphere dour and determined.
"It's close, very very close," one delegate replied when asked about how the race looked in Ohio. The buckeye state is shaping up to be in 2012, as it has in so many previous presidential races, the quintessential swing state upon which the entire election could hang.
Its economy is doing rather better than the national average – at about 7.2% – thanks in part to the Obama administration's rescue package for the car industry. Against that, voters have been pummelled now for months with a blitzkrieg of negative attack advertising paid for by billionaire conservatives and their controversial Super Pacs.
There is so much noise from the election blaring at them from their TV and computer screens that many voters have already switched off. Delegates who I talked to feared that a feeling of a pox on both your houses was setting in that could suppress turn out in November and make it difficult for either party to drive home its message.
So the picture from Ohio looks very different from the scenes of happy Democratic party activists streaming out of the arena on Thursday night. As they started on their long drives home to Akron or Denver, Las Vegas or Des Moines as though they had received a shot in the arm, that Obama's rousing words had pumped them full of energy.
Which is just as well. As the race enters its final 60 days, they are going to need all the muscle power they can muster.
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