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Lisa Van Dusen | Sunday, August 24, 2008

I can't speak for all women who've given birth, but when I did it, there was a definite over-under moment about six hours into the contractions. As I was pacing around my coffee table cursing the words "creative visualization" and the womb-less bugger who thought them up, I looked down at my stomach, did the quick math on the situation and thought, "Okay, how do I get out of this?"

Then, just when it seemed I couldn't go to the next level, my pain threshold magically re-set itself like a jimmied odometer and I was able to get through the last bit.

As Barack Obama ponders the last 18 months of room service club sandwiches and hog-calling contests and looks ahead to the next few days in Denver, he could probably use just that sort of superhuman second wind.

This next bit for Obama will be a convention week that might have been entirely about hope and change -- and history -- but instead will also be about The Clintons, who, in this melodrama, come with an upper-case "The," and their own spine-chilling organ flourish.

Hillary, as runner-up, will deliver a prime-time speech Tuesday night and Bill, as the former two-term Democratic president and rightful big dog of the party, will speak Wednesday.

She will be nominated and put to an ostensibly symbolic roll call vote because her supporters will have come to Denver, to hear her tell it, in search of catharsis, and political convention roll call votes are famous for their purgative properties.

Observers at the more dubious end of the Clintonology spectrum know that the range of plausible scenarios might include something more sinister and that the process, cleansing though it may be, might also serve to devalue Obama's currency as the nominee.

HILLARY'S VISION

Because the general assumption among Clintonologists of every height, weight and paranoia class is that Hillary, rather than process her belated primary concession as a character-building loss, has seamlessly shifted her gaze toward her own catharsis in 2012, everything she says and does in Denver will be magnified.

In the weeks since Hillary conceded in June, she has been, except for that somewhat unnerving catharsis crack, an absolute trouper.

Bill, on the other hand, has made it known that he is pouting over his perceived mistreatment as a race-baiter during the campaign and that he has doubts about Obama's readiness to lead that couldn't possibly have anything to do with his wife's presidential ambitions. And when Bill Clinton is pouting, we are conditioned to know, anything can happen.

Because Hillary can't afford to do anything that could be construed as disloyal to a Democratic party she'll need in about two years if her universe unfolds as it might, her speech will likely be gracious, unequivocally supportive and wistfully humble about her own destiny.

But Bill's will be parsed for how long it takes him to mention Obama, how much of it is about Hillary, how much of it is about him, whether he uses the word "ready" and whether it's delivered by his voluble, generous inner dog or his gnarly, grudging, thwarted-entitlement inner dog.

If their famously double-edged political instincts haven't been entirely doused by anger over losing the nomination (and especially if, by the time this runs, she happens to have been named the longshot/shock-and-awe VP choice), they'll both give genuinely unifying speeches.

It's fun, right?

Obama, meanwhile, has to look like he's having fun again. He has to remind Democrats of why they wanted change in the first place and what that has to do with John McCain. He has to either explain why he won't fight dirty or decide that he will. And he has to revisit the issue of race in a way that establishes the act of transcending the wrong kind of doubt as a patriotic thing to do.

If he does buy into creative visualization, I'd suggest he picture a Denver boot; that big ugly metal clamp used to thwart scofflaws and carjackers. It was invented in 1953 by Frank Marugg, a violinist with the Denver Symphony Orchestra and a man who clearly possessed a fine appreciation of both artistry and muscle.