Democrats left their convention in Charlotte, N.C., with an unusual amount of unity and enthusiasm, but the three-day-old strike by 26,000 teachers in Chicago has quickly deflated some of that enthusiasm — and could, some political analysts say, ultimately put some sizable cracks in the coalition that President Obama hopes to ride to re-election.
"I've never seen since '84 this degree of unity and enthusiasm through the ranks left and right of our party," said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.
By contrast, defenders argue that, besides promoting party unity and enthusiasm, conventions allow compromise and tend to produce nominees and platforms that represent the political centre rather than the extremes.
Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican minority leader who has a considerable stake in the unity and enthusiasm of his party next year, said primary campaigns were intended to be hard-fought contests that put candidates through their paces to help voters decide who was best prepared to to run for president.
At the White House and at Mr. Obama's campaign headquarters in Chicago, officials bristled at the critiques, which they dismissed as familiar intraparty carping and second-guessing that would give way to unity and enthusiasm once the nation is facing a clear choice between the president and the Republican nominee.
But they don't report on crime at Glastonbury; they report on the sense of unity and enthusiasm".
No one consciously decides not to win, no one ever thinks that they don't much fancy winning the World Cup, but this was a team who were mentally fatigued and subconsciously lacked something intangible: conviction, necessity, intensity, concentration, joy, enthusiasm, unity.
Perhaps Europe's leaders should have been more alarmed when enthusiasm for unity began fraying even before the crisis.
This new connection fired up Nazi enthusiasm in Unity (middle name Valkyrie), who soon became friendly with Goebbels, Göring, and Hitler.
But it remains to be seen if the enthusiasm and unity fostered by the World Cup can be sustained, or if a national torpor will overtake a fractious country in which much of the population lacks basic services.
