The Dol: Fired Up. Ready to Go.

Note: I'm going to post pictures. I'm not sure if they'll be in this post or in a separate post, but they are coming.

Thursday afternoon, Elsa, Marcus, Dave, Marsha and I left our hotel to get on the  Delegate shuttle bus to go to Invesco Field for the Convention. We had to leave earlier than usual to get through security and get good seats. Elsa and I kept having moments. We would grab each other by the arm and say, "I can't believe it!" One time I screamed for no good reason and practically gave Marcus a heart attack. He thought I saw Oprah. (I didn't see her, but she was in the restaurant across the street from my hotel, and there were about 100 people outside with their cameras. Spike Lee was having a drink on the balcony above.)

The excitement in the city of Denver was off the charts. People were hanging out in the lobby of our hotel with signs begging for tickets into Invesco. I managed to get an extra ticket and gave it to Heather the Adorable, who works on Nick Leibham's campaign here in San Diego. She had tagged along with Dave and Marcus, but didn't have credentials.

When we got to Invesco, we really got a sense of what was coming. The Pepsi Center is a big arena, but Invesco is, well, enormous. After going through security, where my tambourine was confiscated (it's much easier to shake a tambourine than to clap as much as the level of excitement requires--I'm just being pragmatic here) we made our way toward the entrance.

Delegates entered through the same place that you see football players run out of at the beginning of the game. We came out right at the bottom of the field through a tunnel. When we walked out the end of that tunnel, we walked into a stadium that reaches up to the sky and all the way around us.

The entire delegation was seated on the field itself, in front of and around the stage area. We were surrounded by the media platforms and banks of cameras. Andrea Mitchell was walking around us so much that I finally got tired of taking pictures of her for posterity.

It was bloody hot on that field, people. A woman in front of me had to be taken off the field for heat stroke. I found out later that she did manage to come back in before Barack's speech. I left the field a couple of times to stand in the shade. We were all grateful when the sun dipped below the rim of the stadium.

Things started to get very crowded by about 6:30 p.m. The media was swarming, trying to find places to camp out among the delegates, and they kept getting shooed away by the fire marshalls, who wouldn't allow people to stand in the aisles, even if they did work for The Washington Post. Every delegate seat was taken, as far as I could see.

Oh, and those fire marshals would shut down entry to the delegation area at any time. One San Diego delegate, who was a Hillary delegate, missed Hillary's speech on Tuesday night because they shut down the entryways to the floor. You can imagine how upset she was. I was extremely careful after that to be quick if I left my seat and not to leave my seat at all after about 6:00.

The evening was awe-inspiring. The 84,000 people--let me say that again, 84,000 people--who came to see Barack speak, were in high spirits. There were flags passed out around he stadium fluttered, including a number of large flags that the campaign dispersed throughout the crowd.

Up above, in the highest area of the stadium, if you looked carefully, you could see the sharpshooters around the perimeter. God bless 'em, I was really happy to see them there. I'm not someone who owns or likes guns, but I was relieved by the presence of police with guns that night. 'Nuff said.

I'm not sure how much of the event aired on the networks, or if you might have caught some of it on C-SPAN, but the speakers and performers were all outstanding. Cheryl Crow rocked, Stevie had us all singing and swaying, and will.i.am and John Legend brought the house down with the "Yes We Can" song. If you haven't seen that video online, you really need to watch it now.

Howard Dean was awesome and tough. I love Howard! You know you're a political junkie when the phrase "50-State Strategy" makes you weak in the knees.

Al Gore invigorated the crowd, which is sad and funny, considering he was the Original Wooden Man back during his 2000 run. Let's try to not even think about what life would be like now if we'd had President Gore.

When Barack finally took the stage, what I felt was a sense of overwhelming pride and amazement. We made it. We were there to nominate Barack Obama as our candidate for President. I need to go back and watch the whole speech again on YouTube, because there were places where I wasn't paying attention due to sheer overwhelm. Sometimes I got distracted by other people in the crowd who were crying, laughing, hugging, and obviously feeling so proud and thrilled that it was almost impossible not to look at them and just enjoy the feeling of shared humanity.

I won't go into the particulars of the speech. I hope you watched it, or that you will watch it online.

By the end, I was crying (I pretty much gave up on doing anything fancy with my makeup after the first night). An African-American man in front of me was turning around very slowly, looking up around him at the crowd with tears just streaming down his face, his flag held high.

Back in January of this year, Barack Obama gave his famous "Yes We Can" speech, in Nashua, New Hampshire. He said, "We've been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope."

I buy it, people. I buy that he wants to change things, and I buy that we can help him do it. Our system demands that we participate, in order for it to thrive. Even if Obama wins (God help us if he doesn't), we will need to hold him accountable, and we will need to continue to support people running for office at the local level.

He is human, he will let us down. He will make mistakes, he will make some poor choices, and there will be very powerful people whispering in his ear. When Barack says that this movement isn't about him, it's about all of us, "the millions of voices calling for change," you don't have to believe him.

But you do have the power to make it true.

Comments

[Polly Poppins]

I am very excited about this election. I have not felt so positively about a candidate for a long time.

[Diosa]

I buy it too, Dol.

[The Dol]

I am really excited about how excited everyone else is. :-)

And can we all take a moment to laugh at John McCain's unfathomably poor choice for veep? I imagine they'll smooth her out a little in the coming weeks, but for right now I'm just amazed at the lack of judgment. News reports are indicating that she wasn't even vetted.