Charlie_Brennan's Blog

Wednesday night as he was leaving Fox31’s skybox studio at the Pepsi Center, I stopped Mayor John Hickenlooper as he was on his way out the door and shook his hand. “It looks like you pulled it off,” I told him.

Looking like an anxious student who found out the final wasn’t as bad as he’d feared but won’t know until he has seen the final grade, Hickenlooper smiled slightly and said, “Well, so far. Knock on wood,” and rapped his knuckles on the door to our suite before heading off in the direction of the Clinton suite, two doors down the hall.

Well, he did. They did. This thing worked, in a big way.

Up to last night, I heard one (that is, 1) complaint, and that was from a woman who said she’d had trouble getting cabs. Last night, for the big finale, there were more – and I was one of those doing the complaining.

Somewhere about 6 p.m., fire marshals determined that there were too many people choking the Invesco Field floor,, and started refusing re-entry to people who had gone up to the main concourse for food, beverage, a restroom break or what have you. Having stepped outside Invesco to do a live shot for our 5:00 p.m. show, I was among those who ran up against stone-faced security after stone-faced security, denied in my attempt to get back to Fox 31’s work space on the west-side sideline media area. There were many, many people, separated from their spouses, children, or belongings who were extremely perturbed, some in tears, as they desperately made their case for being made an exception.

I finally found an actual fire marshal, who told me that if I made my way down the ramps at Invesco’s north end, to the field-level tunnel, he’d heard some were being allowed entry there.

That was not the solution – at first. In fact, there I found I was in good company, in a bad way. Among those being barred by the Secret Service were Jenni Engebretsen, deputy public affairs director for the Democratic National Convention Committee, - the hosts of this rodeo - and Matt Chandler, spokesman for the Obama campaign in Colorado. That was some comfort. As Engebretsen furiously worked her Blackberry for a solution, and Matt glumly disappeared elsewhere into the bowels of the stadium, it made it easier not to take my predicament personally.

As we stood there sweating and watching one of the bigger moments in both our careers appear to be taking a wrong turn down nightmare alley, I said to Engebretsen, with apologies to Sen. Joe Biden the night before, “This is not the change we need.” Engebretsen was finally able to summon the Secret Service guy’s boss and make a convincing case for her entry – leaving me feeling like the Titanic passenger watching the last person get into the lifeboat ahead of them. I, too, eventually was granted clemency, getting an escort back onto the field by a Broomfield cop, at the direction of the Secret Service, 90 minutes after I had left. I had missed Al Gore, several entertainers, and had long enough to contemplate my next act, professionally, after my news director fired me for missing the biggest story of this year, and perhaps several other years, as well.

So, there was stuff like that. Our Fox31 crew enjoyed the benefits of a private shuttle that got us close to the venues each night, and on Thursday night it sure appeared to be a good thing that we weren’t relying on public transportation or other means to get in and out of there.

Inconveniences. You’re going to have that, when you invite the world to your town to be part of something that has never happened in more than two centuries of this nation’s history, the nomination of a minority member to head a major party presidential ticket. If anyone thought it would be easy, they’re only part-time inhabitants of the real world. We will find out in subsequent days and weeks, as the first-draft history of this escapade is revised in a second and third draft, that there was some money misspent, that there were people who never got back down to their seats, that expenses for some item or items far exceeded budget.

But unless something truly ugly, so far undetected by the 15,000 media members in town for the festivities, comes to light in the near future, then all the above was worth it.

A brief mention, one more time of Recreate 68, the affiliated protest groups who exceeded even Brett Favre over the summer in number of press conference appearances to say things that annoyed people. The number, one more time, that organizer Glenn Spagnuolo predicted would come here to raise havoc, was 50,000.

There were reasons to dismiss that outright as ludicrous. Here are a few. One, that happened to be the same number DNC organizers hoped to bring to Denver, total, to participate in the event. It seemed highly unlikely protesters, in an age when even the Iraq war hasn’t generated protests with those numbers except for on a rare handful of occasions, it made no sense that hordes would be storming the gates against a party that, for example, opposes the Iraq war and was preparing to nominate either the nation’s first African-American or a woman to a major party ticket.

 Another is, every press conference I attended for a protest group prior to the convention was the same small cadre of usual suspects. Spagnuolo, Barbara and Mark Cohen, a couple of others. There was one memorable briefing in Civic Center Park, where one protester showed up to say he wasn’t going to be associating his efforts with Spagnuolo, anymore. I soon developed a strong sense that we were in a small echo chamber, listening to the same small cast of characters speaking to hear themselves speak, and who had figured out that on a slow summer day, if you hold a press conference, the media will come. And, if you don’t slur your words or have obvious food stains on your shirt, we’ll listen and take you seriously enough to put you on TV.

Maybe we’ll change our policy, in some cases.

Point is, law enforcement officials, even while asking us, “Why do you keep covering those guys?’’, had to also act as if they were real, and posed a legitimate threat and make plans accordingly. So as you cursed the road closures and phalanxes of police who might have slowed you down this week, I’d say don’t blame authorities or the DNC. Blame the people who made a career over the past year warning that it all would be necessary.

The 84,000 people at Invesco Field to hear the son of a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya, the “guy with the funny name,” as his wife endearingly first knew him, the man who wrapped his speech by honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. by declaring, “America, we cannot turn back,” know that they saw history with a capitol H. Small children who were on hand, but too young to understand much more than the fireworks, will tell their grand-children generations from now, I Was There.

You can’t put a price-tag on that, and if you and I had our moments of inconvenience, they don’t matter.

Wednesday night, after Hillary Clinton brought the roll call vote to an end by moving for Obama’s nomination by acclimation, and after Bill Clinton delivered another one of his speeches for the ages, I was walking up the 16th Street Mall toward my hotel, soaking up the excitement, the vibrancy, of a former cow town that has been growing up in fits and starts for the 24 years I’ve lived in Colorado, and had shown the world competence, class – and a week-long party worthy of the words “mile high.”

On my way up the mall, gathered in a group near Champa Street, there was a circle of children, young girls, playing with hula-hoops. This was about 10 o’clock at night.  If there was any one image, outside the political arena, that showed what a success story this week has been, that’s the one that will stay with me. Children with hula hoops late on a summer night on the 16th Street Mall, while, oh by the way, every business in sight that still had its doors open was still doing a brisk business. A lot of people had done something right, to create a scene like that.

With apologies to Barack Obama, yes we did. Perhaps in another 100 years we should do it again.