If anyone can pull it off, master-orator Barack Obama can.  Still, delivering his democratic nomination acceptance speech at mile-high Invesco Field is risky.

A lot has changed since 1960 - the last time a party acceptance speech was delivered from an outdoor stadium. Then it was John F. Kennedy. The stadium was Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. “The New Frontier” speech was surely stirring for those who were there, but television wasn’t such a factor for those who weren’t.  Most viewers didn’t see the grainy, distant film until well after the fact. Print media was much more important in 1960.

In 2008, cable news and the Internet have changed the game.

We all expect that Barack Obama will deliver a superior speech - that’s what he does. He will fire up the stadium. The cheering throngs will jump to their feet. They’ll cry. There will probably be a fainter or two. But here’s the risk: the millions of viewers outside the stadium are more important than are the 75,000 inside the stadium. This is more than a fact of mass. The undecideds, the middle-Americans, the Republicans will be watching from elsewhere - and Senator Obama needs them.

Barack Obama will need to connect intimately with the TV and Internet viewers, or risk making them feel like they weren’t invited to the party.  He needs to be large enough to fire up the stadium (big voice, big gestures, big pauses to soak up the cheering), yet subdued enough that the rest of us feel he’s talking to us. 

He runs the risk of turning his historic speech into something like a Broncos pre-Superbowl rally. Maybe he’s a mile too high?