I decided to skip the caucus meetings in the morning in favor of going to a press conference being held outside Union Station by Nancy Pelosi. The topic was American Energy Independence. Denver seems to have a pretty good public transit system, which includes light rail and hybrid buses that run up and down the 16th Street Mall in a loop from Union Station through the shopping district. Pelosi and the other House members participating in the press conference took the Mall shuttle to the station, where quite a large crowd of bystanders had gathered.

A group of McCain supporters holding placards shouted Drill! Drill! at every opportunity but the Speaker simply spoke over top of them, referencing Republican President Nixon’s 1970s plan for energy independence. Which seemed a bit rich to me, considering that Pelosi was surrounded by white-haired politicians who had had every opportunity over the past thirty years to do something about oil-dependency but never had.

Suffering politician burn-out under the blazing Colorado sun—remember, I’m a mile nearer the Fiery Orb in Denver than I am back home in Oakland, which is a mere 42 feet above sea level—I retreated to the shade of a coffee shop on a nearby side street, emerging just in time to see a cadre of people in army uniform running and stopping in unison. It was Operation First Casualty, street theater ops carried out by Iraq Veterans Against the War.

Click for big version

The reverse of the postcard shown above said:

“Right now somewhere in Iraq a scene like this is playing itself out, often with deadly results. Our troops are caught in the middle of a violent occupation where they are unwanted by the majority of Iraqi people. In order to survive daily missions soldiers are taught to us brutal, dehumanizing search and seizure tactics. The detention of Iraqi civilians combined with corporate fraud has inevitably led to resentment, distrust, and frustration. This is what is fueling the insurgency and our troops are paying the consequences with their lives and limbs. The average American and Iraqi citizen pays for the occupation in blood and taxes.”

The group was being shadowed by police on bicycles but none of the heavily armed police officers guarding the building that the coffee shop was in, nor any of the uniformed Secret Service guarding the vintage train engines at Union Station, took any action. It had been a different story last night when protestors and police clashed, as reported in the giveaway daily paper, the Denver Daily News.

As high noon approached, I again boarded a shuttle for the Pepsi Center and was surprised to see there was no sheriff’s deputy on board to check my credential. Silly me! That’s because the shuttle wasn’t actually going through the outer security perimeter but was dropping us off a whole university campus away and we had to walk in. Actually, it was a better way to get there despite the heat and hefting of laptop and sundry other bits of technology and their inevitable accessories. Oh, for the early days of Stateside when a pen and paper and a cassette recorder were all I needed! Of course, that’s really all I do need, but I love looking like those techie guys who tweak things and bustle about with bumbags full of doo-dads.

Who should appear on stage for a rehearsal just as I checked out my seating spot in the Gods at the Pepsi Center, but Chelsea and Hillary Clinton. Maybe by next year the short but byte-supersized video I took will have finished uploading to YouTube and you’ll be able to see what I saw! Suffice to say, it was three hours before the day’s speeches from the podium were scheduled to begin, so very few delegates were present, but a lot of press were there taking photos. Ms. Clinton Sr. strode about looking very commanding and in control, and even gave one of those annoying waves she gives to some unseen member of the audience. Perhaps it’s a cultural difference, but I find it insulting to every other member of the audience when politicians do that.

Oh! Here it is:

Bizarrely, considering the security overkill at this convention, the podium session began with the band playing “Every move you make, I’ll be watching you.” There was really only one speaker I wanted to watch today, and that was Dennis Kucinich. He was scheduled to take the stage after the Congressional Black Caucus tribute to Ohio Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, who died earlier this week of a brain aneurism. The tribute came and went, then Patrick Leahy of Vermont spoke instead. Thinking that perhaps Kucinich had been dropped at the last minute because he would insist on saying the I-word-impeachment— like Nellie the Elephant I packed my trunk and said goodbye to the circus.

Once outside the Pepsi Center, I called the press help desk to ask what had happened and they insisted nothing had changed. And so it was that when Kucinich gave his rousing “Wake up, America!” speech a few minutes later, I could only watch but not hear it on a screen downstairs in the foyer, where the live closed captioning was a step or two behind what he was saying. The Associated Press has the speech here:

Discouraged by my ineptitude and daunted at the thought of sitting through another couple of hours of same-old, same-old speeches, I headed for the reassuring grittiness of a bus ride back to Congress Park in the company of the working—and not working—stiffs of Denver. I don’t know how reporters do it, sitting through all this self-congratulatory crap. Well, I guess most of them don’t. They go and find someone from their area to interview for hometown publications like the NW Kansas Goodland Star-News and the South Dakota Black Hills Pioneer.

Or enthusiastic teams of student reporters send text messages to their teachers, as on the website http://whenhistoryhappens.org/, which has four live feeds: WHH Teacher’s Blog, WHH Live Updates, Official DNC Blog, and Mass News Feed. A typical text might be: “just watched chris mathews do the loco sign to a protester during commercial break…funny.” The project is coordinated by Jill Armstrong for the Denver Newspaper Agency, publisher of the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News.

And there’s always News Talk Online, the brainchild of Gary Baumgarten, who spent a decade as CNN Radio's New York-based correspondent. It’s part of PalTalk, and has a lot of listeners—or is the word “chatters”—in Australia, Baumgarten tells me. While on the subject of radio… astonishingly, National Public Radio has a workspace set up in a tiny area between the escalator to the third floor of the Pepsi Center and the stairs, hard up against the entrance to the women’s restroom. Surely that’s not their entire presence!

Part Two is transcripts of two early speeches in the day’s proceedings plus a transcript of the Kucinich speech.

More from Rosalea Barker at the 2008 Democratic National Convention:

• Day 2- Part One, Part Two
• Day 1 - Part One, Part Two
• Pre-Convention Day

rosalea.barker@gmail.com

--PEACE--