Speaker Pelosi at the EMILYs List Gala

Speaker Pelosi got to be something of an honest broker in the primary because she remained neutral between Obama, Clinton, and Edwards.

And her role at the convention is to try to pull the party together. She’s noted that Senator Clinton will have her name put into nomination on Wednesday and has lavished praise on the Senator from New York.

The Speaker is far more effective in speaking about policy specifically than she is hitting on broad themes, but she is articulating an ambitious agenda for the Congress. The Democrats need to do a better job of framing these issues. On the one hand, Obama is criticized for being overly broad (“change” “hope”) but on the other, the agenda sounds like a bit of a laundry list: “Health of our children, wellbeing of our seniors, security of our country, and respect for our seniors”. Sounds a lot like the Gore themes of “education, the environment, Social Security, and Medicare”. Issues are not themes. As Michelle Obama did last night, Democrats need to frame these issues in moral terms. The laundry list loses to “big government is bad” and “freedom is good.”

This isn’t to say that the Democrats need to dumb down their platform, but they need to put it into the language of a moral imperative and cohesive worldview.