The big room here at the Pepsi Center was easy, which is just what you'd expect.

Ted Kennedy left 'em crying. The little Obama girls left 'em laughing. Michelle Obama left 'em wondering why anyone ever had any doubts about her.

But the room, despite what you may have heard about recalcitrant Hillary Clinton delegates, was never the issue. Whatever happens with the roll call, this was always going to be an easy room for Barack Obama.

They don't hold conventions for the delegates, though. They hold them for the TV audience - and, in this case, a targeted audience at that. If you're a Democrat who's unsure about Obama and or an independent Democratic leaner who's unsure about Obama, this convention's for you.

The formula is easy enough. If Obama wins the Democratic vote in a Democratic year, he wins the presidency.

And so, Teddy Kennedy, despite being treated for brain cancer with radiation and chemotherapy, gets out of his sickbed to urge a vote for Obama. It was a surprise that he showed up. It was more of a surprise that he spoke.

"The hope rises," the old lion says, "and the dream lives on." And the place goes nuts.

Caroline Kennedy takes the stage in order to persuade voters of the connection between her friend Obama and her father. "I never had someone who inspired me the way my father inspired them," she would say. "But I do now."

And, meanwhile, the Obamas make the case that they are a family like any other American family, a family straight out of Springfield, the one in Father Knows Best, in which Dad takes out Mom for ice cream on their first date, a date, of course, that Mom turns down several times before finally saying yes.

It didn't make everyone happy, apparently. The Republicans were circulating a James Carville quote saying that "if this party has a message, it's doing a hell of a job hiding it tonight." And it was, until Kennedy came out, a subdued night that, for some reason, featured Jim Leach (if you have to ask, you understand the problem) during prime TV time.

But this night wasn't about Democratic policy. It wasn't whether John McCain would, in fact, provide a third term of George W. Bush.

It wasn't about the war in Iraq or health care.

The message was actually pretty obvious. It was to make the case that Americans should feel comfortable voting for Barack Obama as their president.

It went off pretty much the way the Obama people hoped, which isn't to say that it worked.

This is very much a work in progress. The subtext, of course, is whether the Obamas are different from other Americans, meaning, we're left to assume, hard-working white Americans.

Hillary Clinton fans in the room have to recognize the caricature that has been made of Michelle Obama. We've all gotten the e-mails. She hates America. She's a radical. She's angry. She's the grievance lady.

And so on this night, she comes out, her tone subdued, her outfit subdued. She wanted to look, as she said, like a sister, a daughter, a wife, a mom.

The irony, of course, is that Michelle Obama is the poster person for what conservatives always say they think black people should be like, straight from the Bill Cosby collection.

Michelle Obama came from a family of modest means. Her father had MS, but he got up, as she would say, a little earlier to make it work.

She studied hard. Her family taught her and her brother that education was the way to success. Her big brother, who introduced her Monday and said she knew every word from every episode of The Brady Bunch, went to Princeton. Michelle would also go to Princeton. They made it out of the South Side of Chicago.

And after Michelle Obama went to Harvard Law School, she came back to the South Side and got married and now has two children.

This is what she wants you to know about her family and about her husband:

"The Barack Obama I know today is the same man I fell in love with 19 years ago," she says. "He's the same man who drove me and our new baby daughter home from the hospital 10 years ago this summer, inching along at a snail's pace, peering anxiously at us in the rearview mirror, feeling the whole weight of her future in his hands."

Did you see the children? Did you see Obama, in a remote feed, asking his daughters how their mom did.

"I think she did good," Sasha said. Malia agreed. So did Daddy.

That was one message. And then there was the Kennedy message.

If you're of a certain age, you remember the Kennedy convention tributes. Bobby spoke when Jack died. Teddy spoke when Bobby died. And the Ken Burns film that was made in tribute to Teddy showed the night that he spoke of picking up his brothers' fallen standard.

On this night, Ted Kennedy was recognizably Ted Kennedy, even though he was obviously weak from the cancer and the treatment. He picked the crowd up, which responded by chanting his name. And he promised, to loud cheers, that he would be in Congress next year to get universal health care passed in an Obama administration.

The crowd was on its feet. And you can only wonder what Bill Clinton must have been thinking as he watched. Maybe this is what had Carville, the Clinton loyalist, upset.

How small and petulant would Bad Bill seem if he couldn't bring the same kind of game that the ailing Ted Kennedy could?

littwinm@RockyMountainNews.com