DNC '08 Note to the DNCC: Awe-Inspiring Conclusion, But Next Time, Hire an Event Planner
At 1:45 p.m. on Thursday, I left a Democratic Youth Council event at the Colorado Convention Center that I was live blogging on Twitter early to head toward Invesco Field to watch Barack Obama accept the Democratic Party nomination for President. Events at Invesco were scheduled to begin at 3:00 p.m.; Obama was scheduled to speak at 8:00 p.m. I knew there would be a security line. And I knew it would be long.
I'd been to an Obama event many months earlier, at a stadium in my own home town, where I had waited hours to see him speak on a chill winter night, in line with 20,000 other people. I'd seen the lines
But, I thought, Thursday's line would probably go smoothly. After all, Obama's speech in St. Louis had been planned at the last minute; it had been staffed by a small group of local volunteers, and it was first-come, first-serve. This event, on the other hand, had been carefully orchestrated for weeks by the DNCC, the city of Denver, the DNCC, and the Obama campaign; all of the attendees had tickets, and the campaign knew the size of the audience ahead of time. I'd already gone through the formidable security barrier around the Pepsi Center earlier in the week, and despite a long walk through the buffer, that experience had been much less time-consuming than I had expected.
I'd been told by the Youth Council folks who had supplied my Community Credential (the ticket to get inside Invesco) earlier that afternoon that they expected the line at Invesco would probably take about two hours to get through. So. leaving the Community Center before 2 p.m., I expected to be a little late and miss some of the pre-show entertainment.
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