The Convention Blog

The DNC needed a lot of volunteers to actually pull off the Invesco event on thursday night. In exchange for several hours of work in a menial job, the deal was that a credential would be issued that would get the volunteer into the event. We left Regis at 8:30 in the morning, reported to the specified location under the Interstate, were signed in, issued volunteer tee shirts and credentials then were assigned to a team leader. Ours was a guy from Newton, MA who had just finished up at GW. Our job was to keep people on the right path to the two entrances that were actually open and not to let them simply wander around Invesco. The way the site was laid out, the crowd could only walk in a straight line on a few paths and had to show credentials at least five checkpoints before getting to the last checkpoint that was staffed by the Uniformed Division of the Secret Service. At this point, bags were x-rayed and credentials crashed one last time. Good luck sneaking into this event.

Because I come from a long line of people who lived in one of the cloudiest places in the world (Ireland) then moved to another place where the sun barely shines (Boston), I volunteered to work in a tent with the Secret Service. My job was to line people up based on bags or not and to check credentials before the Service folks did it one last time. The bags all had to be x-rayed and having only a couple of lines to do that got people into the venue faster. In addition to being karmic payback for all of my quite justified complaining about airport screeners, it was also a visual study in the impact that Barack Obama’s nomination has had among African-Americans. It is one thing to say or hear that, it is quite another to see it for hour upon hour in face after face. This was true among the political class but was more true among the average people who had managed to get one of the Community Credentials issued by the DNC. This is not say that other people who came through our checkpoint were not excitied, it was that this nomination obviously meant more to the African-Americans in attendance than the simply picking the guy who would be the Democratic standard bearer in the General Election Campaign that it means to the media, much of the political class even within the Democratic Party, and much of the media. I was able to see Joe Biden and Tim Kaine speak and hear Sheryl Crow sing. Sadly, this was more than any of our students working in media placements got to see. None of them were able to leave the building in which they were working and it was located across from the Pepsi Center, well away from Invesco. The students that we had working in Invesco had some difficulty in dealing with some audience members as the afternoon went on. The lower bowl of the stadium was overcrowded, it was hot and this event when on for hours. Probably, many of the people with whom they had to deal were not used to this kind of thing and Invesco was clearly not used to dealing with events that last for twice as long as does an NFL game.

The lead in to Barack Obama was a longish biopic that, if the campaign is smart, it will show as a whole on the night before the election on whichever networks it can get to sell it that much time. Bill Clinton’s folks had produced one of these in ‘92 and it was distributed virally. The Obama pic did a good job of explaining how Barack was just like ordinary average Americans in that it stressed both sides of his heritage, mentioned that his grandfather had fought in Patton’s army then explained who Obama was, what he cared about and how he got where he is. This was a nice bit of work and, in a lot of ways, more useful to understanding the man and his beliefs than was his speech. His actually speech was a nice workman like job that didn’t provide a lot of controvesy. It was solidly centerist, offered some specifics but didn’t contain a lot with which most people could disagree. On the other hand, it didn’t seem in the stadium that it was filled with the soaring rhetoric for which the man has become known. Maybe it looked that way on tv but in person, it seemed like a very good stump speech but that’s all. Once Obama finished, the closing moment when the confetti came down happened as did a huge fireworks display literally shot right over our heads in the upper deck. After that came a benediction in which, in true Democratic fashion, the audience could provide the ending in whatever way their faith tradition did. I am not quite sure the Republicans will end any of their prayers that way. 

After the event ended, it took us an hour to get out of the Invesco Field footprint because nobody remembered to take down the security gates through which people had passed earlier in the day. This is probably because 1) the Service wouldn’t let anyone do that or 2) the DNC was so focused on getting the event to work that it didn’t think about what would happen once it did work. Anyway, this meant that we got back to Regis close to 11:30, most of us had to pack and we had to clean our townhouse too. I got to be about 1 then back up to finish at 4. At 5:30, I moved my gear to the bus stop, the bus left at 6 then it was onto the airport.

The airport security was easy for us because Frontier has its own terminal. While we were waiting for the plane, most of us were surfing the web and found out that McCain had picked Sarah Palin as his VP Choice. Personally, I think this was the smart move to make for four reasons: 1) the gender problem Obama has, 2) the Conservative problem McCain has, 3) She can balance questions about McCain’s age (it would help if she had more experience than being mayor of a smallish city and two years as governor of a small state in population terms ) and 4) she can claim to not be closely associated with the Bush Administration or politics as usual in Washington. The Obama people we spoke with at the airport thought that she wasn’t a good pick because she won’t flip any states automatically. This is very much in keeping with their thinking about the overall election and the hard lesson the party learned with Al Gore in 2000. All that matters is winning the electoral college and that is clearly what their goal is and how they are thinking about everything that happens for the next two months.