Review of the Democratic National Convention

I've broken this up into three posts. Hopefully it will be easier to read that way.

Note: like Tolkien, I could use a good editor. Some of this you will find long winded and you should skip to something more interesting, like reading the phonebook. I am keeping this format as a story so in ten years, I will remember all that happened. Just be glad that I'm not including every detail about navigating the Denver public transportation system.

Being in Denver at the time of the Democratic National Convention was a fantastic experience. It was deep, but not very broad and there are many moments that you have seen on TV that I missed completely. Before I go into the nuts a bolts of what happened and what I think, here is a personal context of my visit that may help you understand some of the things we said and did.

Originally, I had run to be delegate for Obama in the caucuses with the intention of going all the way to Denver. Those hopes were dashed in the spring and I didn’t think much more about going after that. When the Obama campaign announced that the acceptance speech was to be thrown open to the general public, I still thought, no way. In comes my mother. She determined that she was not going to miss this opportunity to see history firsthand after she had missed the march on Washington in ’63 because her job was to organize a sit-in at the same time. She watched King’s speech from the Mall from a jail cell in Milwaukee. I saw a lot of people from that generation with that determination on their Obama bling and on their faces. My mother told me that she would sleep on a park bench for the chance to see his speech live (one Republican friend noted that if she did try to sleep on a park bench, the police might let her see this moment in history from a jail cell again). I sighed and set out to get tickets. Here, serendipity smiled upon me. I shamelessly used my mother’s story to get the promise of one ticket from an acquaintance (now friend). He later got me into a party for the Washington State Democrats in Denver which allowed me to shamelessly use her story again to obtain not two but four tickets. I also found a friend who set me up with her cousin for a place to stay.