Complete Day 2 Coverage

Well, yesterday was an adventure.  To really understand it, though, you have to understand how I came to be at the DNC.  I'm here because Lauren's aunt is the manager of Sugarland, which played an anti-Global Warming concert here.  Laurie David, the organizer of the concert and the producer of An Inconvenient Truth, got us passes to see the Convention.  On Monday, her assistant Dawn dropped us off our passes, told us to have a great week, and peaced.  The thing is, those were only Monday passes; we had to get a different pass for each day.  Uh oh.

So we spent most of yesterday frantically calling Dawn, running around downtown Denver, and begging and pleading for any help in trying to find our tickets.  Finally, at the sixth place we went, we found the tickets.  The problem?  Only Dawn, who was gone, or Laurie, who was in Martha's Vineyard, could pick them up.  Ouch.

There was a really nice woman from LA helping us though, and she managed to work it out and authorize us to pick up the tickets.  In the meantime, I talked to her brother John, who lived for eight years at 423 Marine St., Santa Monica, CA 90405.  Small world huh?  Until I was 10 I lived at 415 Marine...

Later, when we got out of the office with our tickets in our hands and Lauren in hysterics because she was going to see Hillary, I was really hungry.  I stopped at a little cart and ordered a Philly Cheesesteak.  The guy who was running the cart had bought a "do-it-yourself Cheesesteak maker" at WalMart and turned it into a business.  Talk about American ingenuity!

Unfortunately, he only had mozzarella cheese, but I told him about he joys of provolone.  His main question though was where one could purchase cheese whiz.  I told him to stop going down that dangerous path before something bad happened.

We got to the Pepsi Center, stood in a ridiculous line, went through the equivalent of airport security (no liquids!) and finally got inside.  We got there earlier than the day before but still had terrible seats.  They were marginally better though.

I left them to go walk around and try to find a family friend in the Democrats Abroad delegation, but that was met with complete and utter failure.  Not only would no one tell me where they were sitting, but once I finally found them they wouldn't let me pass a note in.  

Finally, the good speeches started.  Sort of.  I was really disappointed with Mark Warner, and thought that he wasted the keynote address talking about cell phones.  I mean honestly, which of his friends thought that cell phones were going to be a bad idea?  Really... Also, he managed to talk about everything he did in Virginia (which I'm sure was very important) while managing to give absolutely zero reasons why Obama should be elected other than some vague future talk.  I was unimpressed by Strickland as well-- he was a little too slow of a talker for my tastes.

Then the speeches started to get better, with Deval Patrick giving an Obama-esque speech (trivia: David Axelrod runs both f their campaigns) and Brian Schweitzer being a low key animal.  He was getting the crowd riled up with call and response chants and stuck it to the "petro-dictators," a phrase that I think could be used more often in politics.  It just has a nice ring to it.  

Then came Hillary.  All I'm going to say about that is that when she asked whether her supporters were in it for her or for her ideals/other supporters, I finally realized why so many people love her so much.  She's good.  Really good.  I just still think Barack is better.

Afterwards, we met up with a family friend Frances, who was reporting for KCRW.  We got interviewed (the interviews can be seen here).  Then, after a little chile hanging out in the media tent, we went out to go party.  After getting a little lost trying to find downtown, we ended up at the Rising Stars party at this fancy club.  It was really cool except for the fact that after standing in line, getting onto the guest list, being given free water bottles, socializing and meeting people, we were denied entry for being underage.  We spent the next hour trying to catch a cab home.  Which sucked.

So that was our second day of the DNC.  It was both exhilarating and terrifying, really good and pretty bad.  But it was fun, and we got lots of signs.

peace