The Charlotte host committee knew its audience at the Democratic National Convention. “Government,” the narrator says in a video produced by the committee for the opening of the convention, “is the only thing we all belong to.”

The Obama campaign quickly disavowed the video. But it captured all that was to come. The Charlotte Democrats are of, by and for government — especially when it is guaranteeing and facilitating access to abortion. Democrats apparently held the convention in the Time Warner Cable Arena only because the local Planned Parenthood clinic down on Albemarle Road wasn’t available.