DENVER -- There are two Democratic National Conventions here in Denver.

The first one is the official convention, which has a sole purpose: to sell Barack Obama, not as a different kind of Democrat, but as a red-white-and blue everyman. Mr. Middle America.

The speakers Monday night downplayed the accomplishments and uniqueness of Barack and Michelle Obama by highlighting what makes them like an average family. Michelle Obama's brother, Craig Robinson, introduced his sister as a woman who wouldn't be on the campaign trail if her mother couldn't watch the two daughters.

For her part, Michelle Obama told the convention that, "what struck me when I first met Barack was, that even though he had this funny name, and even though he had grown up all the way across the continent in Hawaii, his family was so much like mine." Which is ludicrous -- not so much because he was raised by a white mother and white grandparents, but because he grew up acutely aware that his father had abandoned him.

Read Joshua Green's piece in September's "The Atlantic" on the strategies debated by advisers to Hillary Rodham Clinton and you understand this convention. As Clinton pollster/guru Mark Penn argued, Obama is "unelectable" because of his "lack of American roots."

"Every speech should contain the line you were born in the middle of America to the middle class in the middle of the last century," Penn told Clinton in a strategy memo. Team Obama has ripped a page from that strategy, and you hear it echo wherever you go. At this convention, Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., D-Ill., announced, "Illinois is America."

In a similar vein, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters, "Joe Biden is the all-American boy." Pay attention, heartland: Democrats want you to know that they are Middle America, not that they know what is best for Middle America.

This is a convention of progress: It shows an America in which black and white Americans don't live in different worlds, and share the same values. Continued...