DENVER--Barack Obama just wrapped up his nomination speech here at Mile High stadium, and it's already clear that the chattering classes are content. "Magnificent," said Pat Buchanan. "Awfully impressive," added Bill Kristol. "A masterpiece," concluded David Gergen. The reaction in the stands--shouting, stomping, phoning loved ones, snapping photos, weeping--wasn't much more equivocal. That said, it's worth remembering, despite all the understandable uplift, that neither pundits nor partisans will decide November's election--and worth wondering what the people who will (that is, undecideds) thought of Obama's performance.

Considering that Chicago distributed the evening's 60,000 civilian tickets solely to supporters who'd agreed to volunteer for the campaign, I wasn't expecting to find many Nobamans in the crowd. Fortunately, I stumbled upon Malissa Garcia. Her path to Mile High was somewhat circuitous--to say the least. Last weekend, CNN asked Garcia, a 23-year-old hairstylist at the nearby Oxford Club Salon, whether she'd be willing to spend the convention primping, preening and priming on-air Republican strategist Leslie Sanchez and her headful of extensions. She immediately accepted. After four days of follicular service, Sanchez rewarded her loyal tresswoman today with a ticket to the show--and Garcia, reluctant to miss "history," was soon sitting in Section 133 with a tray of chicken fingers on her lap and a camera (one video, one still) in either hand.

She arrived a skeptic. Unlike the hyperinformed true believers who make the most noise online and on the air--and, incidentally, like the vast majority of Americans--Garcia "hasn't been paying much attention to politics this year." Before tonight, in fact, she'd never seen Obama speak. Still, as a committed Clintonista during the Democratic primaries--"the country was in good shape when they were in the White House"--she told me she wasn't sure she'd be voting for the Illinois senator come fall. It wasn't her Republican family giving her grief--Garcia( defied them to support John Kerry in 2004--and it wasn't anything she knew about the nominee. Instead, it was what she didn't know. Saying she was "worried" by an email she'd received, Garcia, a "serious Christian," ran through an abridged list of familiar false Obama rumors: he "doesn't say the Pledge of Allegiance"; he may be "a Muslim"; he was "sworn in [to the Senate] on an Iraq Bible." (I take back that "familiar.") Do you believe them? I asked. "I don't know," she said. "Maybe I won't vote. I'll just let God figure it out."

Then came the feature presentation, with all its pundit-pleasing magnificence and impressiveness and masterpieciosity. As confetti mingled with smoke above the stadium and the Obaman hordes shuffled towards the exits, I asked Garcia whether Obama's performance had changed her mind. "Actually, yes," she said. "I really liked it." So if you had to vote today... "I think I'd vote for Obama," she interrupted. "I'm, like, 75 percent sure." Garcia said she was hooked when Monica Early of Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio--one of a series of "ordinary Americans" who spoke before the senator--confessed that she too had received a "scary email," but had discovered, after checking the facts, that "Barack Obama is a man of faith, a man of values and a man of action." She didn't love Obama's line about civil unions ("I don't agree with that"), but his armada of generals and riffs on education and health care more than made up for it. "My husband and I pay $400 a month, and that's only with partial dental and partial eye," she told me. Before the speech, Garcia associated Obama with "inexperience." But now, she said, "I think he can make change. And middle-class people like me really need change."

This is, of course, exactly what Chicago wants to hear. In fact, Garcia's reactions were so on message, I began to wonder whether David Axelrod had taken to creating cyborgs in his spare time. All kidding aside, Garcia is proof positive that Axelrod and Co. know their targets. They know that the most voters are only tuning in now. They know that a lot of early support is soft, and easily swayed by biographical details, strong surrogates and an isolated policy or two. They know that most former Clintonites aren't dead-enders. And they know that the best way to compete with a caricature of your candidate is to expose as many people as possible to the real thing. What happened to Garcia at Mile High tonight undoubtedly happened to voters all across the country (only without all the confetti). But the flipside of such an easy swing--which will likely show up soon in the polls--is that John McCain has a chance to swing the same people back his way next week in St. Paul, Minn. As Garcia told me, "now I'm going to have to watch the Republicans."

Curious, I asked whether she knew anything about McCain. "Just that he's just like Bush," she said.

Somewhere, David Axelrod is smiling.  

*We exaggerate.