AS MUCH as the Democratic Convention might have looked like typical American hoopla to the untrained eye, it broke significant new ground according to political behavioural scientist, Drew Westen.
Dr Westen said the Democrats had for the first time in decades begun to use emotion as well as their Republican rivals.
Of recent Democratic candidates, only Bill Clinton had instinctively known how to appeal to voters' emotions. Al Gore and John Kerry had failed to respond promptly to emotive negative campaigns aimed at undermining them.
Speaking after a week in which the convention routinely switched from a rock concert, to a party, to an indictment of the Bush administration, to emotional accounts of the lives of candidates as ordinary, vulnerable people, Dr Westen said it was nothing like earlier Democratic performances.
"This looked to me like a Republican convention in the sense that the staging was magnificent, the choreography was magnificent, the emotional tone of the speeches was largely superb," he said.
"It was pageantry, but it wasn't corny. It wasn't the old hokey kind of Americana. It did seem like a parade, but it found a balance. It seemed serious, yet it drew your eyes in.
"Bill Clinton had it with the music, but this time they really got the staging and the choreography right. Now that sounds superficial, but if you want people to pay attention to you, you have to grab their eyes and their ears and this time the Democrats did that."
Dr Westen, a clinical psychologist and author of a study of emotion in politics — The Political Brain - said that the Democratic party had for 30 years mostly pitched its messages as rational, logical plans, designed to appeal to voters' conscious self-interest.
"The Republicans all that time have understood that is not how the mind works at all. We are fundamentally driven by our emotions," he said.
"If you think about what people will remember from this convention, they'll remember Michelle Obama's speech which she did not fill with content. She talked about the lives and values which she and Barack had lived.
"She so clearly demonstrated that she is a person first, an American.
"She dispelled the image that the Right have been trying to create of her, of the angry black woman with a chip on her shoulder. I don't think she could have done that better, to say we are just like you.
"They'll remember that Hillary gave the best speech of her life. She began what Democrats have not done - and the Obama campaign has not done - which is the indictment of the Bush Administration.
"They'll remember Joe Biden's story, putting fatherhood first and his son now going off as a reservist in Iraq."
Dr Westen said that even the electronic pageantry seemed to carry an unconscious message of newness. It was clearly the result of internet era technology as if to imply this was a modern candidacy.
He said the week had been as successful as the Democrats could reasonably have expected, in removing the sense that Obama was alien and not truly American, and in beginning the attack on the results of the Bush Administration.
The election remained theirs to lose.
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