All eyes this week were on Denver and the glitz and glamour of the Democratic National Convention, which many commentators likened to a Hollywood production with an emphasis on personalities rather than issues.

Media coverage made a political soap opera out of Bill and Hillary Clinton supposedly vying for the limelight one last time before the party formally throws its support behind its nominee Barack Obama, who will address the convention today.

In a speech on Tuesday night, Hillary Clinton urged her backers to get behind Obama to prevent a John McCain presidency, the Chicago Sun-Times reported. “I can’t wait to watch Barack Obama sign a health-care plan into law that covers every single American”, she said, reminding the convention floor that health reform was a key issue for her supporters.

Clinton also attacked McCain, who will be formally endorsed as the Republican nominee at his party’s convention next week. “John McCain says the economy is fundamentally sound. John McCain doesn’t think that 47 million people without health insurance is a crisis.” She repeated the Democratic message that a McCain presidency would be a continuation of George W Bush’s policies.

Michelle Obama, who could be the country’s first African American first lady, said the lack of a universal health-care plan and a failing education system were costing the US “billions of dollars” and those are “investments we can’t afford to miss out on”. She said in a speech that her husband would have universal health care in place by the end of his first term.

Her pledge drew the following comment from the Rocky Mountain News. “On a day where everything seemed to revolve around Hillary Clinton’s moves, at least one observer questioned whether the comment was an attempt to remind people that Clinton failed in her attempt to revolutionise health care during Bill Clinton’s administration.”

The Republicans kept up their attacks on Obama by focusing on the divisions between him and the Clinton camp, as well his recent suggestion that he might consider supporting a single-payer health-care plan, such as expanding the Medicare programme.

“Voters don’t like having bureaucrats tell them what they can and can’t do in terms of [medical] treatment”, Matt McDonald, a senior advisor to the McCain campaign, told the Rocky Mountain News.

Meanwhile, the Progressive Democrats of American, a liberal, activist group, lobbied Democratic delegates to make sure Obama and the party does not move too far to the centre-right in the quest to win votes. The group supports a rollback of the Bush tax cuts and a bigger government role in the provision of health care.

“Sen Obama doesn’t exactly oppose any of those impulses but he hasn’t fully bought into all of them either”, said The Wall Street Journal. “He’d roll back some but not all Bush tax cuts, for instance, and is a long way from backing the kind of government-funded, universal health insurance system many progressives want.”

The paper quoted Donna Smith of the National Nurses Association who said the goal of progressives was not to get the Democrats to sign on to national health insurance because that would be too difficult. But they did succeed in getting the party’s platform language to call for “guaranteed health care” for all Americans without specifying how it was to be achieved. This was only the first step towards national health care, she said.

But Michael Yaki, the Democrat’s national platform director, dismissed the debate over health-care language as a “semantic issue”.

Meanwhile, a new poll by The Wall Street Journal and NBC News showed voters named their top three concerns to be job creation and economic growth, energy, and health care. The paper said the choice of Joe Biden, a senator with much foreign policy experience, as Obama’s running mate risked neglect of domestic issues in the campaign.

Data from the US Census Bureau show the number of Americans without health insurance dropped last year, although the figures were compiled before the economic downturn began late last year so probably give a more optimistic picture than the reality, said experts in The New York Times.

“In 2007, at least 26 states made efforts to expand [health] coverage, but as the economy has turned downward so have state efforts”, said Diane Rowland, executive vice-president of the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Sharmila Devi

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