Maybe we can.

From start to finish, the massive production of last night's Invesco Field extravaganza was as close to perfect as it could get. You could sense electricity in the air from the moment of arrival. By the time Sen. Obama arrived, Mile High stadium was packed to the rafters and it exploded with an outpouring of emotion and enthusiasm when he took the stage.

Leading up to that, an impressive lineup of distinguished speakers including Martin Luther King, III, Mark Udall, Tim Kaine, Bill Richardson, Al Gore, and Joe Biden among others, along with great performances by the Yonder Mountain String Band, will.i.am with John Legend, Sheryl Crow, Stevie Wonder, and Michael McDonald, kept the momentum building for the big finale.

One early highlight was the American Voices program, which featured "regular citizens" telling their stories about why they support Obama.

Pamela Cash-Roper, an unemployed nurse from North Carolina told of how she and her husband lost their health insurance and then suffered devastating health problems they can't afford. She said she was a life-long Republican and rattled off all the GOP presidents she had voted for, but never again. It struck me that here was a voter who had been voting against her own self interests for years and finally wised up. If this is a trend in this election, the GOP is in trouble.

That segment's best one-liner came from Barney Smith, an Indiana worker who was laid off after 30 years when the plant he worked at closed and moved to China. Smith said ""We need a president who puts Barney Smith before Smith Barney." The remark got a standing ovation as the crowd chanted "Barney! Barney! Barney!"

My other favorite one-liner came from Bill Richardson, who said "John McCain may pay hundreds of dollars for his shoes, but we'll be the ones paying for his flip-flops."

When the big moment arrived, the lights went down and an Obama "meet the candidate" campaign video played on the big screens. The crowd of 80,000+ fell silent, and you could have heard a pin drop in the delegation seating areas on the field.

Then Sen. Obama took the stage and Mile High Stadium went berserk.

He went on the attack early, singling out McCain economic advisor Phil Gramm's suggestion that we were in a "recession of the mind" and that Americans were a bunch of whiners. Obama rattled off the very real economic struggles of hard-working people in America and said "These are not whiners." He added that the Republican idea of an "ownership society" means that "you are on your own," and said it is "time for them to own up to their failures."

Early on he addressed concerns that he's been short on specifics in his speeches. Saying "I'll give you some specifics," Obama rattled off a laundry list of campaign promises, including tax breaks for workers and small businesses, eliminating tax breaks for companies that move jobs overseas and instead giving them to small businesses who create jobs here in America, ending dependence on Middle-Eastern oil in ten years, billions here for alternative energy research, billions there for education, protecting Social Security equal pay for equal work, and so on.

In a shout out to the energy lobbyists, he indicated support for "clean coal" (which has been all over this convention) and safe nuclear power.

People who have been following the campaigns have heard all this before, but this was a night for introducing Sen. Obama to the 100 million or so voters who are just now starting to pay attention.

One annoying habit, and it's not just Obama, is the tendency for candidates to say "I am going to do this," and "I am going to deliver that." The truth is, Obama obviously can't enact a tax cut or fund an energy research program. Only Congress can do that, and all Obama or any president can do is lead on the issues, and sign the bills into law or veto bills that are contrary to his policy agenda. But I guess it's shorthand designed to a) bolster his image as a strong leader, and/or b) convince low-information voters that he can get all this done. Either way, at least he's got his priorities straight.

Unlike Bush, whose answer for every crisis is for us to just go shopping while Cheney and the other adults take care of it, Obama said that renewing America's promise requires a "renewed sense of responsibility from each of us," saying that this is not the time for small plans and that we must meet our moral obligations, and that individual and mutual responsibility are the answers. For example, he noted that government can't make kids turn off the TV and do their homework, and admonished fathers to get more involved with their kids.

Next he bolstered his foreign policy credentials and judgment by attacking McCain's, with lines like "he'll follow bin Laden to the gates of hell but he won't even go to the cave where he lives." He pledged again to end the war in Iraq responsibly.

He then moved to the post-partisan politics part of his speech, saying that Democrats and Republicans must "cast off the worn-out ideas and politics of the past" to restore our "sense of common purpose our sense of higher purpose."

Judging by his remarks, this apparently includes pandering to the anti-abortion, anti-gay, and pro-gun single-issue voters. This may be disappointing for some liberals, but don't expect conservatives to credit his moderate position on these issues.

Then he got into the inspirational part of his speech, which was, as usual, what he does best. He decried making "big elections about small things" and said that "the change we need doesn't come from Washington -- change comes to Washington."

Obama rolls like a rock star and his well-run campaign has done an incredible job of energizing a new generation of voters and attracting working-class Americans who are willing to at least take a look at the long-overdue change Obama is selling.

And looking around at the young (and young at heart), diverse, highly-charged crowd at Mile High stadium, there was a palpable sense of the torch being passed from the Baby Boomers in charge of Depression-era politics to Generation X, with Generations Y and Z jumping on the bus for the wild ride into November.

The Obama campaign's masterful job of juxtaposing stodgy, old-school GOP politics and the image of their fossilized leadership with the spectacle of last night's stadium-rock-fueled 21st Century politics gets one thinking "maybe we can," which is the first step to closing on "yes we can." I don't know how it played on TV, but Obama, the "always be closing" candidate, likely moved millions of prospects one step further down the road to closure.

Speaking for us fatigued Baby Boomers on board, all I can say is that we're happy to hand over the reins of government (well, maybe not the Clintons so much), but these kids, they'd better deliver.

OK, then.