DENVER--The official theme of last night's festivities, according to the Democratic National Committee, was "Securing America's Future." But "Changing the Subject" is a more accurate description of what went down here in Denver.

Unless you've been living in a steel-encased hyperbaric capsule embedded in the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, you're probably aware that for the first three days of the convention the media has focused most of its time, talent and money on the "conflict" between Barack Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton. Nevermind that that actual conflict is rather minimal--a molehill being sold as a mountain, as I wrote on Monday.

Since the opening gavel, we've been treated to stories on the "heated" negotiations over Wednesday's roll-call vote, the speech-related "tensions" between Bill and Obama, the "struggle" of Hillary dead-enders to accept her loss and, of course, the hidden meaning of HRC's "very limited hand gestures." Cable news-chatterers like Keith Olbermann and Wolf Blitzer were happy to spend hours "analyzing" whether the Dems were "being too soft on McCain" and "obscuring Obama's message"--at the same time, incidentally, that a parade of Democratic governors, senators and congressmen were whacking McCain and delivering Chicago's economic talking points up on stage. As NEWSWEEK's Jeremy McCarter wrote in these pages, "the resulting coverage had about as much connection to what happened onstage last night as NBC's Olympics coverage would have had if Bob Costas had spent two full weeks asking other sportscasters how they feel about the shot put." By Wednesday morning, no one would've been surprised to read in the New York Times that Hillary had secretly "delivered [a] non-endorsement [of Obama] by blinking it in morse code."

Thank goodness, then, for last night's marquee speakers: Bill Clinton, Joe Biden and--most surprisingly--John Kerry. In the days leading up to Denver, much of the punditocracy predicted that Bill--physically incapable, according to them, of conveying anything but utter disdain for Obama--would spend his speech indulging in yet another homage to Hillary's historic near-nomination and reminding everyone of what an awesome president he was. They forgot, it seems, that they were talking about the preeminent political tactician of the last 20 years. The only moment of blatant self-regard in Bill's speech--saying "I love this" when the crowd greeted him with three minutes of sustained applause and frantic flag-waving--was unscripted, and in its puppyish earnestness, endearing. Relying on meaty paragraphs rather than easy applause lines, the rest of his remarks were about Obama--or, more accurately, they were about framing the election as a choice between the Democrat who will "lead us away from division and fear of the last eight years, back to unity and hope" and the Republican who "still embraces the extreme philosophy which has defined his party for more than 25 years." Bill went far further than Hillary in describing why Obama himself--and not just any old Dem--would make a better president than John McCain, praising the Illinois senator's "intelligence and curiosity" where Hillary praised his party affiliation. And because there was still a "hint of jealously and rue" in Bill's voice, as NEWSWEEK's Howard Fineman wrote last night, his compliments sounded completely convincing. He hadn't been force-fed or coaxed or cajoled. He wasn't just doing his duty. You got the sense, rather, than Clinton really (if begrudgingly) respects Obama, another Democrat said to be "too young and too inexperienced," for outwitting him--even if he hasn't completely "gotten over" the first loss of his career. Ultimately, the "surprising" warmth of Bill's speech was irresistible storyline for a press corps seduced into expecting too little from him; and oddly enough, their resulting raves have, at long last, shifted the spotlight away from the Clintons. "Now eyes turn, and finally, to Obama," wrote Peggy Noonan in the morning's Wall Street Journal. "This was one of the great tee-ups."

The primary purpose of Biden's speech was to focus those eyes where Chicago wants them to focus: on the economy. Peppered with references to his middle-class roots in Scranton, Penn. and Wilmington, Del. and his elderly mother, Catherine Eugenia Finnegan Biden--who taught him to respond to bullies by "bloody[ing] their nose so you can walk down the street the next day," and exclaimed "That's true!" when her son mentioned the episode on stage--the first section of Biden's acceptance address was the strongest. In it, the Delaware senator continued to cast himself as a blue-collar average Joe, precision-calibrated to "feel the pain" of the struggling American family; channeling their concerns into a fanciful collage of kitchen-table conversations. "Should mom move in with us now that dad is gone?" he asked. "Fifty, sixty, seventy dollars just to fill up the gas tank?" The goal, of course, is to convince wary "white ethnic" voters that Biden is one of them (sources say that Catherine Eugenia Finnegan Biden is an Irish-Catholic name), and then to let Biden convince them that the guy at the top of the ticket isn't a total space alien. As former Clinton speechwriter David Kusnet notes, "he presented resilience as the great story of his own life, the great virtue of working Americans, and the great goal of an Obama-Biden administration." It's too early to say whether the strategy is succeeding. But last night, the power of his personal narrative, and the media's curiosity about what sort of sidekick he'll be. was more than enough to move the ball beyond the Clintons--for good.

Speaking before Bill and Biden, Kerry wasn't broadcast on the cable news channels. But his may have been the most impressive performance of the three. When the Massachusetts senator and failed 2004 nominee started speaking, few people in the hall were paying attention. In fact, Kerry emerged in my conversations this week with Democratic officials as a sort of party pariah; everyone in Denver seemed determined not to repeat the mistake he made at 2004's Boston convention, when he demanded that no one utter an ill word about Bush. Turns out no one was more determined than Kerry himself. Happy to perform the time-honored senatorial two-step of praising a colleague--"I have known and been friends with John McCain for almost 22 years"--before ripping him to shreds, Kerry delivered the single most effective critique of McCain I've heard to date, highlighting in remarkably clear and concise language the gap between McCain circa 2002 and the McCain who's running for president. "Let’s compare Sen. McCain to candidate McCain," he said. "Candidate McCain now supports the wartime tax cuts that Sen. McCain once denounced as immoral. Candidate McCain criticizes Sen. McCain’s own climate change bill. Candidate McCain says he would now vote against the immigration bill that Senator McCain wrote. Are you kidding? Talk about being for it before you’re against it." That last line--a reference to the famous flip-flopping charges leveled against Kerry in 2004--got big laughs in the Pepsi Center's press box. Although Biden also attacked McCain, Kerry was a story. The former admirer--he wanted McCain to be his running mate--turns the tables and delivers "by far the best speech [we]'ve ever seen from him." The result: a swarm of hacks (like me) repeating the only fully crystallized critique of McCain to come out of a convention cluttered by a "mish-mash of objections" to Obama's Republican rival. And that's one thing Obama wants Wolf and Keith to chatter about.