Obama at peace with Clintons as goes after McCain

By Steve Holland - Analysis

DENVER (Reuters) - Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama finally wrested his convention away from the Clintons on Thursday and opened the assault on Republican John McCain that Democratic leaders had been demanding.

Obama and his supporters spent the better part of two days of a four-day national convention dealing with the Clintons, Hillary and Bill, using up time that might have been better spent defining their rival McCain.

In the end, they succeeded by achieving some measure of party unity, with both Clintons giving rousing speeches on Obama's behalf despite tensions remaining from his defeat of Hillary Clinton in a bruising battle for the party nomination.

"It seemed to me that the Clintons did what they needed to do," said Democratic strategist Jim Duffy. "But it does also seem like the last two days were more about them than him."

When Obama's turn came to address his convention, he did so before a crowd of about 75,000 supporters at the Denver Broncos' pro football stadium, standing in front of mock Greek-style pillars that gave the evening a rock concert feel.

Republicans called the big show an act of hubris expected of a candidate they denounce as a celebrity, but the stadium gamble allowed the Obama campaign to offer some powerful imagery for Americans and draw a big Colorado crowd in a state considered an important battleground in the November 4 election.

Urged by Democratic leaders to toughen up the attacks on McCain, Obama did just that, calling him out of touch, an acolyte of unpopular Republican President George W. Bush and misguided on foreign policy.

Obama attacked a central premise of McCain's campaign, that McCain is a foreign policy expert needed in a dangerous world.

His tendency to concentrate on the Iraq war more than on Afghanistan is wrong, Obama said, slamming McCain with a phrase McCain likes to use about chasing down al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

GATES OF HELL

"John McCain likes to say that he'll follow bin Laden to the Gates of Hell -- but he won't even go to the cave where he lives," Obama said.

Larry Sabato, a political science professor at the University of Virginia, said he would rank the Democrats' 2008 convention about in the middle of the 17 of both parties he has attended, and that given four days to define McCain, this was done in only two of those days.

"They were able to make Obama more acceptable and to restore some measure of party unity, but they never defined John McCain in terms that will help them in the fall," Sabato said.

Republicans felt McCain got off relatively easy.

"I think McCain was able to, thanks to the Clintons, successfully not be the pinata this week," said Republican strategist Scott Reed.