ARTISTIC NOTES

Posted at 1:16 p.m. ET

Urgent Agenda readers are cultured, artistic, and sensitive, so I thought you'd like an update on how the aesthetics of tonight's speech by Barack Obama are being handled.  The New York Times, which respects our feelings and vulnerabilities, and understands our anxieties, reports:

DENVER — When Senator Barack Obama announced in early July that he would give his nomination address in an outdoor stadium in front of 75,000 people, he wowed members of both parties who saw it as an inspired stroke of campaign image making.

But...

With daunting challenges of logistics, style and substance, the plan was hatched before the Republicans began a concerted drive to paint Mr. Obama as a media sensation lacking the résumé to be president. Now Obama aides are feeling all the more pressure to bring a lofty candidacy to ground level, showing that Mr. Obama grasps the concerns of everyday Americans.

Yes, he feels our pain, like another president, but the setting, the mood, must show it.

On Wednesday, workers were still making changes to Invesco Field, home to the Denver Broncos, so it would feel more intimate, less like the boisterous rallies that served Mr. Obama so well early in the primaries, but also created the celebrity image that dogs him.

They were still testing camera angles, so Mr. Obama would appear among the giant crowd, not above it. They took steps to reduce the echo effect, familiar to football fans, of speaking in such a cavernous space. Planners scrapped their idea to turn the audience of 75,000 into a giant phone bank, in response to fears that the cellphone system would crash (people will instead be asked to text-message friends and neighbors to support the campaign, program aides said would be effective nonetheless.)

Some 75,000 fans will be asked to text message?  I'm moved.  The sense of discipline.  The lockstep thinking.  Leni Riefenstahl would be so proud.

And workers put the finishing touches on the backdrop: faux columns intended to suggest a federal building in Washington and create an air of stateliness. (The McCain campaign named it the Temple of Obama, a label repeated by some commentators.)

Well, when the candidate doesn't have an air of stateliness, I guess you do Hollywood sets. 

Some aides worried about the setting overwhelming the message. But those closest to the planning said they had no regrets and were sticking to the sort of big-event politics that no other candidate has been able to match this year.

Fellas, you're not running for the nomination anymore.  Get that text message?

When a close circle of his top advisers presented Mr. Obama with $6 million plans to move his acceptance speech to the football stadium in early July, the candidate asked one question, said Anita Dunn, a senior strategist: “Will it rain?” The campaign produced a raft of meteorological data showing it had rained on Aug. 28 only once in 20 years. (Aides were alarmed, however, to arrive in Denver on Sunday to news of a nearby tornado.)

It's just like the Obama crowd to try to predict the weather weeks in advance.  They seem to feel they have a direct connection somewhere.

...the circular stage in Denver was inspired by Kennedy’s. A Sky Cam above the field will provide bird’s-eye views. Mr. Obama’s family will sit on seats on the floor before him, along with voters from swing states. The goal is to highlight ordinary people, and then mobilize them to work for the campaign.

The Obama campaign dismissed Republican attempts to turn the night against them.

“I know that Senator McCain and his people are shooting barbs on the opulence of our convention from the mountaintop in Sedona from the McCain estate,” said David Axelrod, the campaign’s chief strategist. “I don’t think it warrants a response.”

Especially when you haven't got one.

Why do I think we're about to see an embarrassment?

August 28, 2008.