Photo: Jason Kosena/Colorado Independent

Photo: Jason Kosena/Colorado Independent

It was the old Reagan/Bush I hand Peggy Noonan who described the stakes in Hillary Clinton’s speech to the DNC most succinctly. It was clear, more or less, what Clinton would say, Noonan told NBC. What mattered was the inflection of the performance–whether Clinton sold her support of Obama/Biden from the floor to the rafters of Pepsi Center and to living rooms across the land.

This she did, with the most pitch-perfect rallying cry of her public career. And although the speech Clinton gave feels inevitable in some sense after the fact, because remarkable pieces of public rhetoric always do, what she would do did not seem obvious to anyone five minutes before the fact. Here’s betting that she singlehandedly afforded Obama his fretted-over post-convention bounce in the polls.

Hillary’s address may prove to be a pivotal moment in the presidential campaign, but that depends mainly on things that have not yet have happened: most immediately, tonight’s speech by Bill Clinton, a man who by all accounts is still seething with jealousy and resentment toward the upstart Obama; and most consequentially, Hillary Clinton’s own words and deeds between now and November 4.

Hillary Clinton: Democratic Convention speech, pt 1 (8:23)

Hillary Clinton: Democratic convention speech, pt 2 (7:16)

Hillary Clinton: Democratic convention speech, pt 3 (7:21)