Obama's Task.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Barack Obama - Essay

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Barack Obama's opponents have used charges of identity politics and celebrity worship to tar him. But no one is really immune. Certainly not Hillary supporters who are so mad about their candidate's loss they are willing to vote for McCain at the expense of everything she stood for. Not even Ralph Nader, who advertised a "star-studded" super rally at the University of Denver to compete with the Democratic Convention. Sean Penn was the headliner before a crowd of about 1,500 students.

Penn may be an attraction for his Hollywood status, but more than glamour, his speech added a note of bitterness to the proceedings. He was full of hard, angry words about "traitors" in Washington "feeding at the trough of our Constitution." (OK, hard, angry and a little muddled, metaphorically.)

He didn't know who he was going to vote for, Penn said, but he defended the option of voting for Nader--"a genuine American hero"--as well as "the Ron Pauls, the Bob Barrs, Cynthia McKinneys, and Dennis Kucinich." The crowd went wild--especially for Ron Paul. But Bob Barr?

"Let's not forget that Obama was the biggest spoiler of them all," Penn said. Practically spitting at the Clintons and other members of the Democratic establishment who were shocked by Obama's rise, he compared them to "little kids who want to take their ball and go home"--even as the Clintons were conceding at the convention.

"Whoever you vote for, you better hold his ass to the fire," Penn concluded. "Next time someone says, 'How dare Ralph Nader run,' you ask them what they did for their country today," he suggested. "If you find them dumbstruck or arrogantly dismissive, you tell them Ralph Nader is coming for them."

This was pretty much the opposite of the tone at the convention.

When the Black Eyed Peas took the stage for a live version of Obama's "Yes We Can" speech set to music, followed by the recorded voice of MLK giving his "I Have a Dream" speech, I looked around to see two African American women in the Wisconsin delegation in tears.

"Our country should be proud of itself today. That's all I have to say," said Paulette Dorsey of Milwaukee.

In the Louisiana delegation, Elsie Burkhalter, a superdelegate from Slidell, had just moved out of a FEMA trailer. "I lost everything," she said of Hurricane Katrina. Yet, even with another storm moving in, her optimism was affecting. Obama, she said, had tapped into the same youth energy that sent thousands of college kids to help...