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DENVER — They're worried. They should be.
Thousands upon thousands of the Democratic faithful and media hangers-on have flooded into Denver, a city whose downtown is now defined by traffic barriers, helicopters hovering, army trucks rumbling and men - almost all men - in every kind of uniform whose sole function is to tell you: "You can't go there."
The Democratic National Convention should be a celebration of a party on the cusp of routing the Republicans in Congress and recapturing the White House.
Instead, their candidate is essentially tied in the polls with a septuagenarian war hawk who knows little about economics and nothing at all about the Internet, even though Democrats traditionally enjoy a big lead during the summer.
Barack and Michelle Obama wave to supporters with Joe and Jill Biden this weekend in Springfield, Ill. The Democratic National Convention begins today in Denver. (Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images)
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Suddenly, Barack Obama seems vulnerable, his soaring rhetoric last season's movie. The fairytale campaign that galvanized the Democratic base is not playing so well outside it.
Women always prefer Democrats, except this time. Right now, Mr. Obama and John McCain are essentially splitting the women's vote. In the 2006 midterm elections, independents surged over to the Democrats. Now they seem to be ebbing back to the Republicans.
His campaign becalmed, Mr. Obama chose Joe Biden, as grizzled a warhorse as ever sat in the Senate, as his running mate. It was a safe choice. It had to be. Suddenly, Mr. Obama can't afford to take chances.
Now he has four days of exclusive media attention, at a national convention dedicated to the sole purpose of making the presidential nominee appear presidential.
Mr. Obama must use this opportunity to relaunch his campaign so convincingly that he eclipses next week's Republican sequel. The summer was won by John McCain. But in this game, autumn is the only season that counts. It's time Mr. Obama started to deliver.
Think about it: The United States is in the sixth year of an unpopular war; the government is mired in deficit and debt; people across the nation are watching their home equity evaporate; fuel costs have soared. The people rightly blame the Republican administration for all of it.
Surveying such a promising landscape, the Democrats dared to dream. They could discard the safe picks. Yes, Hillary Clinton had a perfect résumé and would have been the first woman presidential nominee. But refried Clinton? Was there nothing else?
They shrugged equally at the other veterans: Bill Richardson, the New Mexico governor who served in Bill Clinton's cabinet; Mr. Biden himself, with decades of experience in foreign policy; Chris Dodd, a senator with his own distinguished record; John Edwards, the handsome champion of the working man and woman. (We didn't know, then, about the affair.)
Instead, led by a zealous army of African Americans, the young and the urban affluent, they chose a charismatic former law professor and community activist whose oratory could curl your toes, and who just happened to be black.
But industrial workers, mothers struggling to hold the household together, owners of SUVs and minivans and pickup trucks often don't have a lot of respect for the opinions of the young, and even less for the condescending white-wine set. And some of them don't want to see a black man in the White House.
That is why Mr. Obama's faux pas on Saturday was so telling. In their first public appearance together, Mr. Obama introduced Mr. Biden as "the next president -" then he corrected himself, "the next vice-president of the United States."
And that's the point. In terms of experience and qualifications, a Biden-Obama ticket would have made more sense. We caught a glimpse of what might have been, Saturday, when the Delaware senator and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee - itself one of the most powerful jobs in Washington - his white hair tousled, holding down his wind-blown pages of text, growled and barked and stormed through a speech that warned against the "Bush-McCain" foreign policy that has "shredded our alliances and sacrificed our moral standing around the world."
So maybe this hardscrabble kid from Scranton, who has endured so much personal tragedy in his life, who still commutes from Delaware to Washington on the train, and who has waged so many battles in the Senate, winning more than his share, will inject some tough-handedness into a campaign that, in recent weeks, has veered between petty sniping and Adlai Stevenson-like detachment.
But vice-presidential nominees don't win elections. That's the presidential candidate's job.
Mr. Obama has three tasks before him this week. He must succeed at all three, or he will lose this race.
First, he must unite the party. In choosing Mr. Biden over Ms. Clinton, Mr. Obama has further disappointed her supporters, which may account for his difficulties with the women's vote.
To compensate, Mr. Obama has offered the Clintons, wife and husband, a fair chunk of the convention's prime-time coverage. The wounds will never fully heal. But Mr. Obama must remind these disappointed Democrats that, in vowing to stay home or to vote for Mr. McCain, they could be handing the Republicans at least two Supreme Court nominations (liberal justices John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsberg are expected to retire during the life of the next administration) at a time when the future of Roe v. Wade hangs in the balance.
Second, Mr. Obama must sell the Democrats' message of economic populism - tax the rich, protect jobs at home, invest in schools and health care instead of war - to the very audience for which it was designed: the lower-middle and working classes, especially in the industrial Midwest. The rustbelt states will decide this election, and the Democrats are barely holding their own there.
Third, he must remind Americans of what they would be getting in Mr. McCain - a good and decent man, a man of courage, who nonetheless would keep America mired in Iraq until the chickens came home to roost; who shrugs at the broken health-care system; who thinks America can drill its way out of dependence on foreign oil, who admitted just last month he has no idea how to access the Internet or read e-mail - why the Democrats don't make more of this is a mystery - and who would risk another cold war with Russia. A man, in short, who hasn't changed his mind since 1980.
The odds still favour the Democrats.
They are doing well in races for the Senate and House of Representatives, where they are expected to make real gains. More people are registered as Democrats than Republicans.
And Mr. Obama has almost limitless money to spend, and his legions of fervent volunteers in 50 states who are seeking to register voters in unprecedented numbers. If this election is decided on the ground, Mr. Obama should be president.
But at the end of Summer 2008, the Republicans themselves are surprised to discover their presidential candidate is still in this fight.
And their convention is yet to come.
Mr. Obama's admirers think of him as the new Jack Kennedy. But Jack Kennedy almost lost.
Michelle Obama, the potential first lady, addresses Democrats after a rocky summer as the target of conservative attacks.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the nation's first female Speaker of the House, opens the convention. Ms. Pelosi has represented the San Francisco area in Congress since 1987.
Senator Edward Kennedy, the Massachusetts senator, who has recently been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumour, is the subject of a recorded tribute. The video will be introduced by his niece, Caroline Kennedy.
Former president Jimmy Carter, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, addresses Democrats on opening night.
Jesse Jackson, Jr., the son of the civil rights activist, has represented the Chicago area since a special election in 1995 and is a national co-chairman of Barack Obama's presidential campaign.
Former congressman Jim Leach, a leading Republican moderate, broke ranks with the GOP and endorsed Mr. Obama earlier this month.
Associated Press
