How the Party Parties

T he welcome party for the 15,000 members of the media
covering the Democratic National Convention in Denver was held, rather
appropriately, at a giant amusement park called Elitch Gardens.
Everything was free for the night and so, there among the roller
coasters and water slides, the people who help write the election
storyline wolfed down buffalo meatballs and crowded into lines for
mojitos and beer. Then they proceeded to drop themselves from something
called the Tower of Doom, launch themselves skyward via a reverse
bungee jump known as the Sling Shot, and proudly hug large stuffed
animals they had won through various feats of coordination and
strength.

It felt as if the planners tasked with aligning every convention
visual with an obvious message were being uncharacteristically sly
about this one, pretending to celebrate the media’s mass arrival in
Denver on Saturday, August 23, with fun and games and rides while
actually teasing us, setting us up to literally enact all the most
common insults associated with the political press: a carnival of
self-
satisfaction, a fun house of unreality, a group of easily
distracted adult children who live for the sensational thrill and the
open bar.

I drank a huge mojito and, I must say, felt quite satisfied.

Then I rode a roller coaster called the Mind Eraser.

It didn’t work.

Even after a 60-mile-an-hour, 10-story drop and some
stomach-lightening loop-de-loops, I was still caught
up—completely, rapturously—in the cast of political
characters who were, at that moment, descending from the sky into
Denver, still thinking about all the plots, subplots, and nightly
cliffhangers that were about to unfold. Would Michelle Obama, in her
speech on opening night, fit herself neatly into the “all-American” box
or come off as an “angry outsider”? Would Hillary Clinton, in her
speech on the second night, be magnanimous in defeat or play the role
of the churlish knee-capper? Would the delegate roll-call vote on day
three, and the speeches that evening by Bill Clinton and Joe Biden,
reflect well on Barack Obama or embarrass him? Would Obama’s
closing-day speech at Mile High Stadium, an address coincidentally
occurring on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a
Dream” speech, meet expectations and launch Obama triumphantly into the
final phase of the election? Or would it fizzle and leave him ever more
vulnerable to attacks on his “celebrity” and hubris?

This was all racing through my un-Erased Mind two days before the
convention opened at the Pepsi Center, a basketball arena just across
the railroad tracks that had been renovated for the occasion (50 days
of renovating, 5,000 seats removed to make way for an American
Idol–like stage, 3,300 miles of telecommunications cable
installed to help the rest of the world learn what was happening
inside). I also was thinking: Say what you will about Democrats in the
past offering up wilted, stilted personalities for the
presidential-race drama. This year, at least, they have brought out
big, boisterous, limelight grabbers—the inspiring, history-making
Obama; the spurned Hillary and Bill Clinton; the fading Ted Kennedy
handing out pre-deathbed blessings to his anointed heir; the
philandering and consequently banished-from-the-convention John
Edwards; the gray-maned, working-class hero Joe Biden. (No wonder the
Republicans have been lacking for media oxygen. Who—at least
until the arrival of the soap opera that is Sarah Palin and
family—wanted to take their eyes off the Democrats?)

After the amusement park was a house party hosted by Salon.com. With every hotel room in Denver
booked long ago, the writers for the online magazine were spending
convention week in a rented home that felt a bit like Real World:
Northeast Elite Edition. Someone pushed past me, asking where the
martini makings were. Someone else pointed to the stainless-steel
fridge. Outside, David Carr, New York Times media critic and
notable former crack addict (his new memoir, Night of the Gun,
explains all) was shouting into his cell phone, apparently on a
first-name basis with a cab driver. Inside, the talk was of the
just-announced Biden pick and whether an Obama-Biden administration
would be a disappointment. A liberal political columnist said,
essentially, that nothing could be that disappointing about the first
African-American presidency in the United States. A liberal magazine
editor quickly shot back, with a smile, that this kind of thinking
represented “the hard bigotry of soft expectations.”

Then we went to Rock Bar, which had been renamed, for convention
week, Barack Bar. White guys and girls were dancing jerkily to “Rock Me
Amadeus.” So many sticky drinks had been spilled on the carpeted
section of the floor that it felt like we were walking on glue. We had
another drink, unstuck ourselves, went home to a crowded apartment that
I had taken to thinking of as a tenement for broke journalists, and
slept the sleep of the drunk and politically obsessed.

I had never been to a national political convention before,
and the best piece of preconvention advice I received came in an e-mail
from a savvy political operative a few days before Denver. It was a
four-point plan for success:

1. Sleep through all breakfasts. (“You have to sleep sometime.”)

2. Develop a party plan in advance and stick to it.

3. Avoid the parties that make you wait hours in line to get in; the
clock is always ticking toward last call, and there are plenty of other
parties.

4. Never, ever pay for alcohol. (“Someone’s always giving it away
for free.”)

This plan, notably, had absolutely nothing to do with the convention
as the average viewer experiences it on TV. “It’s totally ‘two
Americas,'” the political operative wrote. The televised part of the
convention involves the delegates, the speeches, and the pundits who
analyze them. This is the convention of 7:30 a.m. delegate breakfast
meetings, high-
minded midday panel discussions, and sitting
patiently on the convention hall floor from 2:00 until 10:00 p.m. so as
not to miss any responsibilities or Robert’s Rules action. Then there
is the convention of everyone else, which, the political operative
explained, goes like this: “Get up around 10:00, hit a lunch…
maybe… start boozing around 2:00, go to the floor around 7:00 p.m.
for the headliners… booze till 2:00 or 4:00 a.m. Rinse. Repeat.”

Rinse. Repeat.

Rinse. Repeat.

The phrase went through my head every morning as I woke up in the
journalist tenement, showered, and put on the “professional attire”
that getting credentials required. Journalists are used to politicians
forcing them to wake up at insanely early hours of the morning for
conference calls and press availabilities, but in Denver, no big public
business got done before 3:00 p.m. It was lovely, and a recognition of
the fact that most people, including the politicians, had been out
drinking until 3:00 a.m. the previous night and needed to follow Rule
Number 1 (sleep through breakfast) before—rinse,
repeat—showering and heading to one of the early afternoon free
cocktail hours that preceded the opening gavel.

The fatal flaw in my daily convention cycle was that, as someone
with a hungry blog to feed, I didn’t have time for the
sleep-in-until-noon part. The internet, veterans say, has sucked all
the free time out of convention life.

On the second day of the convention, I woke up early in the
tenement, noticed that I was sharing an air mattress with a guy who had
helped me get into two great New Mexico delegation parties the previous
evenings, adjusted to the mellow Denver light coming through the open
windows, heard the fans that had been running all night long moving the
dry heat around the living room, and ascertained that a man who had
arrived in Denver quite sick (in my imagined tenement world he had
succumbed to tuberculosis), and who had been passed out on a nearby
couch for what seemed like two straight days was, in fact, still there
sleeping, but with his hanging bag now draped over the windowsill,
perhaps a sign that he intended on this day to finally rise and put on
“professional attire.”

I grabbed one of the free bikes Denver was offering for the week,
rode across town to the convention hall, left to go to a free 4:00 p.m.
cocktail hour hosted by the liberal watchdog group Media Matters, and
then joined the procession—the regular afternoon hustle, always
featuring the sweated-through shirts of credentialed types
(journalists, “honored guests,” “special guests,” delegates,
congressmen and -women) walking briskly toward security checkpoints
around the Pepsi Center. This afternoon the procession was huge, with
important D.C. sorts trying to cut the line using the trick of
pretending to talk about urgent matters on their cell phones to avoid
being stopped by the police who were attempting to maintain order. The
reason for the crush of insiders: Hillary Clinton was to give her
prime-time address that evening.

It took about 40 minutes under a very hot sun to get past security,
and then I was in and on the floor, getting pushed aside by workers in
neon traffic-cop-like vests hauling garbage bags of “Hillary” signs to
and fro, watching Andrea Mitchell buttonhole Pennsylvania governor Ed
Rendell for an interview, listening to Clinton speak—magnanimous,
selfless, and a little heartbreaking—and then pushing my way back
out in the dark, warm evening, hustling off to a party hosted by
Politico and the Glover Park Group. After about an hour of free booze
and high-end-journalist schmoozing, and just as Congressman Rahm
Emanuel was pulling up to the door and his Secret Service detail
clearing a path at the crowded entryway, some of us rushed across town
to catch Death Cab for Cutie playing an acoustic set in honor of an
environmental group in the upstairs of an old church. I arrived too
late to hear Washington governor Chris Gregoire introduce Death Cab,
but she was said to be in rare, excited form. It was an amazing
night—Death Cab’s set, the setting, the sweatiness of the young
crowd. The experience was the perfect embodiment of the liberal utopia
that had materialized in Denver over the course of four days—free
music, free drink, politics on the agenda but not as the only item on
the only agenda, sex in the air, dancing, and afterward stumbling out
smiling, then back to part two of the Politico party (it took up two
bars) where former Clinton adviser Howard Wolfson sang his favorite
political song (“Find the Cost of Freedom” by Crosby, Stills, Nash
& Young) for a music writer from Seattle and everyone was talking
loudly about Hillary Clinton or some other bit of political intrigue,
and the lights came up a little before 2:00 a.m., and then off to sleep
so that I could wake up a few hours later and do it all over again.

At some point, someone slipped me an electronic spreadsheet,
prepared by one the country’s leading newspapers, that definitively
cataloged all of the Denver parties, their sponsors, and the points of
contact to get on the various guest lists.

There were, it turned out, an average of 75 parties a day for four
days, put on by interest groups, corporations, and the likes of
Brownstein, Farber, Hyatt, and Schreck. This high-powered Denver law
firm rented out the Daniel Libeskind–designed Denver Art Museum
for a swank preconvention party, where friends and I spotted,
variously: former congressman Harold Ford accompanied by a hot white
woman of exactly the type Ford got slammed for associating with in a
famous Republican attack commercial; Senator Charles Schumer, wearing
awful boat shoes and worse khakis, declaring to a group of elegant
women, “You girls are all too young—do you remember the song
‘Lipstick on My Collar’?” and then singing it for them; and Joe
Pantoliano, aka Joey Pants from The Sopranos, milling about and
not looking very sinister at all.

Events such as that one quickly put to rest any lingering illusions
that the Democratic Party might be different than the Republicans when
it comes to being cozy with lawyers, lobbyists, and such. So did a
reception put on by the odd couple of pharmaceutical behemoth Eli Lilly
and the Congressional Black Caucus, a slew of AT&T-sponsored
delegate luncheons, and a post-gavel party hosted by, among others, the
Distilled Spirits Council. (At the Republican National Convention a
week later in Minneapolis-St. Paul, with an unfortunately timed
hurricane bearing down on the Gulf Coast, there was some hasty papering
over of what these convention parties are all about; a “Political
Chicks a Go Go” party, hosted by Lifetime and others, morphed into a
hurricane relief fundraiser, while the Distilled Spirits Councils’
“Spirits of Minneapolis” party was quickly renamed “Spirits of the Gulf
Coast.”)

In Denver, some of the more revered points in the liberal
constellation were throwing parties as well, and they happened to put
on some of the better events: Planned Parenthood, Human Rights
Campaign, Rock the Vote, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and, memorably,
Trojan, the condom manufacturer, which brought Bill Maher out for a
“condomvention” at which Maher explained the political philosophy of
John Edwards (“There are two Americas, and in one of them I’m single”),
condensed the Republican scare-rap on Obama into one sentence (“His
pastor wears a dashiki and he has a big black uncircumcised cock and it
smells like curry”), and revealed the true racial identity of the
Democratic nominee (“Barack Obama is actually white—that’s a
birthmark”). Outside, afterward, in a not atypical moment, a friend
spotted Susan Sarandon looking a bit confused as she was introduced to
RZA, and listened attentively while nearby, the hottie Nebraska Senate
candidate Scott Kleeb, holding a cigarette, complained about how the
New Yorker had recently drawn him with his jeans tucked into his
cowboy boots, which is not how he wears his jeans.

Some parties were just strange, and made one wonder whether the
combination of perpetual boozing and Denver’s high altitude was
triggering some sort of psychic break. A friend of a friend reported:
“It was right about the time that I was eating coconut-covered shrimp
at the Denver Aquarium and watching a tiger lick up the words ‘DNC
2008′ written in whipped cream that I realized I had no idea what the
convention was about.” Why there was a tiger at the Denver Aquarium
could not be answered by anyone I encountered.

But there was, in the end, a lot more to learn at the parties than
in the scripted, tightly controlled confines of the convention hall.
Late on the eve of the convention—not long after passing a swishy
young man with green highlights saying to someone on his cell phone,
“I’m here at the DNC for a week… I’m doing Diane Sawyer’s hair…
Yeah”—I found myself at a party at the Brown Palace, a
116-year-old treasure of a hotel in downtown Denver, where the New
Mexico delegation was handing out cigars in a literal smoke-filled
room. The decor was outrageous: rococo wall paper, wood-paneled bar,
overstuffed leather chairs and couches, a giant gilded mirror on one
wall, a brass chandelier. It felt like a Wes Anderson film, everyone
quite tipsy, time moving slowly, odd characters drifting in and out of
my field of vision through the haze: a rotund lobbyist dressed in a
seersucker suit, jowls hanging over collar, belly hanging over belt,
sour expression on his face, cigar held daintily in pudgy hands; the
former American Idol contestant Antonella Barba, who explained
she was in Denver as part of an attempt to pump up the youth vote and
then gave me a handbill bearing her picture; a tall Sikh man who was
accompanying the young Ms. Barba; union folks in union shirts; several
black businessmen; a few frumpy journalists.

A flat-screen TV broadcast the Olympics, on mute. No one was
watching. Later it would come out that more TV viewers watched the
Democratic National Convention than the summer games, which made sense
to me. The convention was simply the better show, lousy high-stakes
drama and political intrigue, even at this New Mexico delegation party,
where, in a back corner, an acquaintance whispered to me that a lot of
the state’s Hispanics, who make up the largest part of New Mexico’s
majority-minority population, and who the Democrats are counting on to
deliver the swing state to Obama, will never, ever vote for a black
man.

Another party, another day, and a political blogger friend was
complaining to me with cocktail in hand that he had no idea how the
convention was being received in the wider world. It was spooking him.
I felt the same way. Both of us were deep inside the bubble, far behind
security barricades and checkpoints, spending so much of each day
broadcasting our impressions outward, and spending every extra moment
living convention life in order that we would have something to
broadcast later, that we didn’t have the luxury of taking in what
everyone else was broadcasting outward. Which only drove home the fact
that the dominant reality would not, in the end, be what the two of us
were experiencing anyway. It would be what the most powerful of the
mass-media broadcasters said it was.

Yet another party, and some interesting talk over Scotch on the
rocks: Someone thought the left-against-left protests at the convention
were failing because a certain class of outraged liberal no longer has
to go out into the streets to be heard by the liberal establishment. He
or she can simply vent in the comment threads of national liberal
political blogs—virtual rage parties unto themselves—and
likely be heard by far more people. Street protest, this man was
suggesting, is now the province of only the most disconnected.

I had been to Denver twice before this convention, and each
time it seemed too empty, its overwide boulevards and boxy skyscrapers
reminding me of Chicago but its street life reminding me of
Yelm—scant in the day and utterly barren at night. This time,
with so many thousands of people from urban America swarming the city,
it felt, finally, like a real party town, as if the people from the big
cities were showing Denver how to fill its bars, dance with its
hookers, and cram culture of all kinds—music, comedy, bad
art—into every available corner.

It felt, too, as if Denver had briefly become some sort of
politico-cultural epicenter, and the resulting combination of
exhaustion and excitement was, I believe, one of the main reasons
people in Denver seemed to be crying all the time during the
convention. Michelle Obama’s mother did the voice-over for an
introductory video, and tears flowed. Michelle herself spoke: more
tears. Hillary Clinton talked about her accomplishments on the trail
and then reminded the delegates she was backing Obama: more tears. Joe
Biden’s son talked about his former stutter: more tears. Mama Biden got
a shout-out from Senator Biden claiming the VP nomination: more tears.
I sat down on a bench next to a Clinton delegate from Washington State
and asked her about her week: still more tears.

Some of this was no doubt the result of a kind of Stockholm syndrome
that affects political obsessives at national conventions, a blurring
and merging of their identities with the politicians who gleefully hold
them in thrall. It was also, certainly, about the isolation of much of
modern American life, an isolation that persists even in this moment of
exploding virtual connectivity, and the presence in Denver of this
isolation’s radical opposite, an overwhelming, crowded, in-the-flesh
perpetual connectedness, far more real and satisfying than the
perpetual connectedness that Obama has so successfully hinted at with
his regular text messages from “Barack” and promised with his talk of
one America. Here, finally, on the packed convention floor and in the
bursting barrooms, was Obama’s America, conjured up in physical form on
a grand, city-sized scale.

It made people a bit more open. It made the parties a lot more fun.
It gave one of the songs that played during an interlude before Obama’s
speech at Mile High Stadium on Thursday a deeper resonance. Who else
but the people behind the Obama campaign would play the moody opening
bars of The National’s “Fake Empire” for a crowd of 80,000 people who
had come to see a potential next president of the United States? This
is exactly what connects the Obama supporters: their sense that for
eight years Republicans have been faking it, to our country’s lasting
detriment, and their exultation at the fact that Obama is not only
willing to call conservatives out on this but also has the capacity to
sell liberalism anew to Americans—in thrilling, stirring
terms.

Up in the hermetically sealed press box, where I was seated with a
bunch of supposedly dispassionate mainstream journalists, it was as if
someone had clinked a glass and put the party on pause.

“Our government should work for us, not against us,” Obama said from
a stage that recalled a White House portico, designed to help the 38
million Americans watching on TV imagine him at the helm. “It should
help us, not hurt us. It should ensure opportunity not just for those
with the most money and influence.” He told the audience that the Bush
tax cuts for the wealthy would be replaced by tax cuts for the middle
class, that the country’s addiction to foreign oil would be ended, that
our broken health-care system would be reformed—huge projects,
yes, but “now is not the time for small plans.”

He spoke of equal pay for women, of ending the war in Iraq
responsibly, and of returning to a sense of optimism and respected
international leadership.

“We are the country of Roosevelt. We are the party of Kennedy. So
don’t tell me that Democrats won’t defend this country. Don’t tell me
that Democrats won’t keep us safe. The Bush-McCain foreign policy has
squandered the legacy that generations of Americans—Democrats and
Republicans—have built, and we have to restore that legacy.”

There were quiet sniffles in the press box as Obama, hitting his
closing emotional chords, echoed King’s words, “We cannot walk alone.”
Then, afterward, I boarded a shuttle bus waiting outside the stadium.
The driver was waiting to be told where she was supposed to go. The
crowd knew where it wanted to go—downtown, the heart of the city,
the heart, at this particular moment, of America. The crowd wanted to
go now. The driver relented. “Yes we can!” the crowd chanted.

I got off, walked through a startlingly alive Denver, and met some
fellow writers at a bar. We ordered drinks. We talked a bit. Then we
told the waitress we wanted the sound on the TVs turned back up and the
station switched to political cable. We knew what we’d seen. We knew
how we felt. But we wanted to know what had happened.

eli@thestranger.com