AMATEUR HOUR. I have the show on, but I haven't been paying close attention. The first night of Convention is usually a loss anyway, and the recent Republican onslaught has had the desired effect of making politics tiresome to me.

What those operatives, and the speakers themselves, can't manage to ruin, TV commentators make up for. After Nancy Pelosi's dazed homilies, I saw David Brooks explaining that what he wanted to hear was a clear message about who exactly Barack Obama is, and that Nancy Pelosi hadn't done it for him. First of all, I hadn't previously imagined that even Brooks was dumb enough to seek counsel from Nancy Pelosi about anything, except maybe how to make his eyes look fresh after a long night out. Second, who on God's green earth believes David Brooks is open to any such argument as he describes, or that his lively curiosity about Obama -- still unsatisfied after dozens of speeches and interviews, and reams of commentary -- resembles that of the average citizen? Maybe Brooks imagines that he has been among ordinary Americans enough for research purposes that he can pass for one: has he not explicated the inadequacies of the Bobos, and thereby earned some down-home cred? I mean, I have to admit that George Will knows a lot about baseball, but who would want to go to an actual game with him?

It was nice to see Ted Kennedy vertical, and able to repeat the tropes and cadences, and achieve the volume, that made his reputation as a speaker, but his performance was the oratorical equivalent of Hitchcock's Family Plot. Jesse Jackson Jr. is a good amateur speaker, but he started high and stayed there: he ran the gamut from Y to Z.

The wife of a Presidential aspirant need only resemble a likable human being, and this Michelle Obama achieved. She was also complicated enough to hold interest. She too is only an amateur speaker, but she has just enough poise to draw our admiration, and not so much that we don't appreciate the effort she expends in maintaining it. I was aware that her address was crafted to appeal to a wide audience, but the patriotic tells didn't bother me, because I could see that she wasn't there for her own sake, or even just for her husband's or her family's. The harsh necessity of countering the ugly stories that have been circulated about her may have forced her into a speech more programmatic than she, or even we, would have liked, but it would take more than a little boilerplate to conceal that she knows both how fortunate and how worthy of fortune she is. People tend to like a person like that, even if they first encounter her when she's giving a speech at a Rotarian dinner.

Outside of that, I heard that we're going to give the middle class a break and end the war in Iraq. Not ideal, but it'll have to do.