Planners achieved a well-crafted vagueness in the stirring speeches of Obama, the Clintons, Biden and Kerry, et. al., at the Democratic National Convention. (I found Al Gore’s address far the best written and delivered.) The GOP might outvague them this week, while desperately competing with hurricanes.

While to do a fraction of what they promise Democrats would have to raise taxes a lot, and probably on many more people than just the rich, there was no whisper of that — only that an alleged 95 percent of the public would get a tax cut, and 100 percent would get health insurance (which I favor).

In the first days of the convention I noted frequent references to helping members of public-employee unions, especially firefighters, police officers and teachers. There was comparatively little about entrepreneurs and small businesses (which create most jobs) or people in the private sector in general. It was good to hear more about the private sector from Senator Obama. And before his speech came the best part of the whole convention — the tales of woe by a series of very believable “little people.” It was a genius pitch to the middle class to bring them out.

Except for overpaid Wall Streeters and senior executives at some public companies, it’s mostly private-sector folks, not those in public-employee unions, who have suffered in the past few years — as health insurance, pensions and other “fringe” benefits have been slashed, and salaries have fallen behind inflation, to maximize stock prices and corporate profits, and compete in our often unpleasant “global economy.”

I strongly support the union movement — it gave us the weekend, among other things! — but see public-employee unions as sometimes problematic. They negotiate with people who have little to lose financially by giving away the public’s store and who know they’ll get substantial campaign help from these organizations in return. Not fair to the general public.

In the private sector, where unionization has plunged — generally to the detriment of the middle class —it’s a different story. Maybe the Democrats should return to their trade-union glory days.

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All hail Michael Soussan, an occasional contributor here, who is coming out with a superb book, Backstabbing for Beginners, this fall. It’s about his misadventures in the U.N.’s very corrupt Oil-for-Food program.

— Robert Whitcomb