Democrats, Democratic National Convention | featured news

Can President Obama and his Democrats successfully make their case for another four years? Here are five things to watch for at this week's DNC.

The famously fractious party that tore itself apart in the 1960s and 1970s over civil rights and the Vietnam War, that lost a series of blowout presidential elections in the 1980s and painfully reinvented itself in the 1990s, faces little of the infighting or self-doubt that for decades seemed as much a part of being a Democrat as worshiping FDR or watching the South, a former party bastion, inexorably slip away.

One of the networks broadcasting this week's Democratic convention could be called Obama TV. The Democratic National Convention Committee is promoting "unprecedented interactive coverage" of this week's confab, built around the first-ever live-streaming of the entire event featuring interviews with delegates, President Obama campaign officials, and various celebrities.

Just minutes after the end of the Republican convention, President Obama appealed to his supporters for campaign cash. "Tonight was their night," Obama wrote in an e-mail. "But our focus must be on tomorrow." And presumably next week, when Obama and the Democrats hold their own convention in Charlotte.

Julian Castro, the mayor of San Antonio, has been tapped to deliver the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte. Castro, a 37-year-old Stanford and Harvard graduate, has been hailed as an up-and-comer in Democratic politics. He is the first Hispanic to give the Democratic keynote address -- a speaking slot that catapulted a then-little known Barack Obama into the national spotlight in 2004.