I understood this more fully only when I came out of the Pepsi Center, and a friend of mine, who is black and a writer, sent me a text message from upstate New York saying that Michelle’s humanity had been diminished that evening: the white majority had imposed on her the view that she could be considered acceptable only if she said nothing critical of her own country.

It is of course self-evident that political conventions are merely as real as made-for-television movies. Everything individual or human, even at the moment it is trying to assert itself, gets quickly swallowed up in the staging of the spectacle. Except when life departs from script, as when Obama’s daughters appeared on screen and little Sasha kept interrupting her father during his video appearance from Missouri: “Hi, Daddy.” “Hi, Girardo family.” “Daddy, what city are you in?” While Sasha had the mike in her hand, it was as if television had returned us to the accents of the real.

This is the right moment to turn to Hillary Clinton who is surely the most artificial politician to have achieved prominence in the world in recent times. And tonight, inside a packed Pepsi Center abuzz with anticipation, I was waiting with a barely suppressed dread for her speech to begin. And beamed on the giant TV screen behind her, the trademark tight thin-lipped smile stretched while delivering a cutting remark. Or, heaven forbid, her hideous laughter.

But when she began to speak, I was moved by the emotion of the crowd in the tiers that rose above me. In the opening moments, we were looking at a sea of white placards which had Hillary’s name written on them. The crowd seemed to let out a sigh like the sea. It would have been easy to let the moment get drowned in regret, but, instead, there was a shift. Instead of speaking about why she ran in the race, and what she learned during it, Clinton began to speak more clearly about the need to support and elect Barack Obama. Everyone was now waving thin blue signs that said Hillary on one side, and Unity on the other. The euphoria was intense.

... contd.