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The first night of the Democratic Convention had a simple, unifying message: Barack Obama: Not Just Brilliant But Human Too!

Of all the tasks that confront him in this pivotal week for his presidential ambitions - putting firm practical flesh on his rather vague message of hope; healing the Clinton rift; proving his fitness to hold the highest office in the land - perhaps the hardest is demonstrating that he is, for most Americans, just like them.

For all his protean talents, there is a remote, unknown quality to Senator Obama.. His emergence from nowhere in the last four years to the threshold of the White House has happened too fast for most people to have more than the most fleeting grasp of who he is. More important, from the fragments of information they do have: many Americans wonder whether he really shares their values.

His unusual heritage, taking in Kenya and Hawaii by way of Indonesia and Kansas; his connections with some highly questionable figures in Chicago politics and public life; even his high-achieving academic success in the Ivy league and the University of Chicago; all suggest someone not quite in the mainstream of American life.

It fell on Monday night to Michelle Obama, his wife of 19 years, to begin to fill in some of those blanks and correct what the campaign insists are false impressions of the candidate.

She did a largely flawless job. The image of the man that came across was not the aloof professor or radical community activist, but loving husband , father and firm believer in good old-fashioned American values.

She left an impression on viewers at home of a man with cares and responsibilities just like theirs:

The Barack Obama I know today is the same man I fell in love with 19 years ago,” she said. He’s the same man who drove me and our new baby daughter home from the hospital ten years ago this summer, inching along at a snail’s pace, peering anxiously at us in the rear-view mirror, feeling the whole weight of her future in his hands, determined to give her everything he’d struggled so hard for himself, determined to give her what he never had: the affirming embrace of a father’s love.”

Mrs Obama herself has sometimes been part of Sen Obama’s human problem. She has at times said things in the campaign that have increased the suspicion that these are not a God and flag-loving American family, most notably when she said earlier in the campaign that her husband’s success was the “first time in her adult life that she had felt really proud to be American.”

But last night , she insisted that she was thankful to her country and was a real American patriot.

“That is why I love this country” she said.

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