DENVER – This city's dominant news/talk radio station is KOA-AM, which has a traffic reporter using the pseudonym Amelia Earhart.

I am not kidding. The airborne traffic reporter is named after the famous 1930s pilot who vanished over the Pacific and was later declared dead. Nice.

I offer this as an introduction to assorted other issues of image control, a key theme at the Democratic National Convention, which tonight will nominate Barack Obama for president and Joe Biden for vice president.

The convention's first night clearly sought to establish pleasant, largely non-combative themes. As soon as Ted Kennedy made it clear that aggressive brain cancer treatment would not keep him from addressing the crowd, it was a simple choice to give him his moment.

But who's the genius who arranged for a long hour of nondescript speakers between Mr. Kennedy and Michelle Obama? By the time she strode into the limelight, the pace of the night had grown positively tedious.

One wonders if Mr. Biden will suffer a similar fate tonight after the Bill Clinton speech. There is also tension as to whether Mr. Clinton will adhere to the foreign policy theme handed him.

I'm guessing Bill Clinton will talk about Bill Clinton. He clearly feels he has not been shown sufficient deference by the upstart Obama supporters. Throw in the bitterness of his wife's defeat, and it may be hard for the former president to stay on the message a unity-hungry convention craves.

And while we're tracking unity, last night's Hillary Clinton speech probably sparked two reactions – grudging submission by her supporters who will now dutifully fall in line and renewed angst from watching their heroine deliver her speech on the wrong night.

History will judge whether Mr. Obama messed up royally by failing to even feign interest in her as a running mate. It takes guts to tell Democratic royalty to talk to the hand, but that statement of independence and toughness may carry a cost.

As Democrats' wounds heal to whatever degree they will, the Obama campaign also finds itself against a force that is a surprise to many: a John McCain campaign that seems to be getting its act together. His sleepy campaign has bolted upright with copious and agile ads scoring direct hits, allowing him to gain ground even after the Biden running-mate announcement.

Of course, it was not helpful that the whole text message gimmick was mightily botched.

It's not the Obama campaign's fault that the media got the story first; I'm surprised it didn't happen earlier. But did they actually sit around a table and plan to hit the send button at 3 a.m. to invoke images of the iconic 3 a.m. phone call every candidate is supposed to be ready to answer as president?

Yeesh. First of all, it wasn't 3 a.m. in 75 percent of the country. Second, delaying the announcement into the abyss of late Friday/early Saturday condemned it to the bowels of the news cycle.

Everyone's paying attention now, of course. Mr. Biden will get his moment tonight, and the house will be rocking tomorrow night for Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show at Invesco Field.

But by the next day, with a McCain running mate revealed and a convention set for a Monday start, the GOP nominee will start to grab headlines. If he also grabs independents and even a fraction of those Hillary voters who tell pollsters they'll back him, then all those President Obama playing cards on sale in Denver's delegate hotel lobbies will be nostalgic collector's items come November.

Mark Davis is heard weekdays from 8:30 to 11 a.m. on WBAP-AM, News/Talk 820. His e-mail address is mdavis@wbap.com.