Live from the DNC

Thursday morning the chief of Barack Obama’s campaign staff, Jim Messina, gave the Idaho delegation insights on the candidate and the big night ahead you won’t find anywhere else.  You heard it here first: 20 generals will line up for Obama tonight in a show of support for bringing the troops home and shoring up the army.

“Barack writes his speeches himself.  This one’s had 4,000 drafts and he was toiling on it last night,” he said.

It’s no accident Obama was in Billings when Michelle spoke Monday.  “He’s been there six times and we’ve got a good chance in Montana,” he said.  “Barack told us from the first we were going to compete in every state.  We believe we’ve got 168 safe electoral votes and 32 leaning our way—Oregon, Washington, Minnesota and New Hampshire.  It’s a lot hard for John McCain to make the numbers work.  If we win Colorado, it gets very hard for him.”

A graduate of Boise High School, Messina has been running campaigns or congressional staffs since graduating from the University of Montana.  He’s on leave as chief of staff for Montana Senator Max Baucus.

“I got a call from Barack asking if he could talk to me.  We talked, he offered me the job if I would do two things.  First, be completely loyal.  No leaks.  Second, treat staff like family.  If I kicked anyone around, I’d have Barack to deal with.”

“Around the campaign we have this saying ‘No drama in Obama.’  We have no time for intrigue.  Obama wants a “flat” campaign, meaning everyone gets a voice.  We have unleashed independent iniative on a vast scale.”

“This is a campaign of smart young people.  One invented the idea of notifying anyone who signed up who the vice presidential nominee would be via cell phone.  We got two million new contacts.”

The day after the Republican convention ends, the campaign will publish 300,000 copies of a new book chocked full of policy specifics which he called “boring” but predicted it would quickly rise to number one on the New York Times best seller list. 

“If people worry about what Obama stands for, this 77 page book will have it all,” he said.

Messina was effusive when it came to Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.

“Hillary Clinton has been amazing.  She called us.  She was right about how to play things this week.  It was there idea that Hillary come to the floor to move the nomination by acclimation.  And she’s going to be on the road all the time.  We could not ask for more.”

“Joe Biden came to Chicago and said, ‘treat me like staff. Put me to work.’  We said we’ll work you hard for six days and give you a day of rest.  Biden said no. ‘Sign me up for seven days a week to the end.”

In other tidbits:

Messina revealed that the Grateful Dead would reunite to stage a concert for Obama.

The campaign will have no money advantage.  The Republican National Committee and independent expenditures will see to that.

After McCain’s Brittany Spears ad, “our people went crazy contacting our supporters.  It was the single best fund raising day we’ve ever had.”

The campaign has a staff of more than 2,500.  When Messina arrives at work at 6 a.m. there are already 200 there ahead of him.  When he leaves at midnight, two-thirds of the staff is still there. 

Early voting at colleges is going to be important.  Messina believes national analysts have underestimated the number of new voters the campaign will bring to the polls.  At colleges, MP3 downloads and voter drives will help swell the vote.

Twenty million women are unregistered and 60 percent vote Democratic—if they come to the polls.  “Women will take over this election,” he said.

The equal pay for equal work issue is huge.  We heard it at this convention but it strikes home not only with women but with men because so many households need two incomes-two good incomes.

Messina was pressed to say Obama would visit Idaho again where he drew 14,000 in Boise in February, pushing him to the largest margin of victory in the nation.  He promised only that Obama would visit Idaho after he is elected.

He expects the Republican convention to try to “tear the hide off us and I think they’ll be good at it.  This will be a very close election.  Ten percent have not made up their minds,” he said

Messina’s parents are Jan and Rick Heller of Nampa.  They’re taking care of his dog.  Funny he doesn’t have time for that. 

There are four times more members of the press at this convention than delegates - over 15,000.  This counts only those with credentials, not the hundreds of hometown bloggers like me.

            Outside the convention hall, five large tents are devoted entirely to the press, including The Big Tent for bloggers.  My cousin Tim Wall, a cameraman for CNN, works out of a multi-storied building nearby complete with a patio serving free ice cream.  Google offers free smoothies and massages.

            If you’re on the third level of the Pepsi Center, you can clearly see into the sky boxes that serve as studios for the major networks.  There’s Bill O’Reilly of Fox News clearly visible over there, the PBS crew nearby, CNN below us and so on.

            MSNBC, however, is a couple miles away, with Chris Mathews and Keith Olbermann perched in a studio on stilts overlooking the train station—where whistles drowned them out last night.  

            Lordie, Lordie, did those boys ever like Hillary’s speech last night!  We seem to have in MSNBC a network which has found its voice being the opposite of Fox News.  It’s like the days when newspapers represented political parties baldly and without apology.  Not a great turn of events in my book, but at least Democrats have one more to their liking. 

            Television cameras have the dominant position on the floor, of course.  To their left, as one faces the stage, are rows upon rows of print journalists ranking high enough to warrant space in the hall.

Long after delegates had left the hall last night, we passed by them concentrated on identical laptops, spinning stories like industrial workers at their looms.  Nearby, a photographer from the Asian sub-continent in a dramatic red turban still found something to shoot. 

The media about the media is itself a big story. 

On a small stage, surrounded by its crew, sat the CNN front-line talkers:  Wolf Blitzer, James Carville, Campbell Brown and the guy who so brilliantly works the electoral map on a touch screen.

I have seldom seen a group so bored, spent and just plain exhausted.  They were waiting to turn on the energy but, until then, were hibernating in plain view, conserving energy like the laptops when not in use.

Particularly Carville.  At a moment’s notice he would be ready to spew out in a single sentence seven reasons the Bush Administration has ruined America but in the meantime he looked like a reptile at rest.

Not so Katie Couric.  Lightly defended and perched on a director’s chair, she looked pert, fresh and at ease.

Leaving the hall we ran across Paul Begala.  “Take the rest of the night off, Paul,” we said.  That raised a smile.  He was off-camera, a regular guy.

Cousin Tim travels with Candy Crowley or is embedded with the Obama campaign on the road.  He was still at work at 10 p.m. and will start again at 6. a.m. In between he’ll try to get a little rest at a Motel 6 18 miles away. 

Someone who works in support of this horde told me last night the media was unhappy with Obama switching his acceptance speech to Invesco Field.  That meant this much of this apparatus has to be broken down and reassembled a mile away for a single speech at additional cost.

Attending the convention with my wife, Rickie, adds to the experience, I’ll tell you that.  For one thing, it means dancing in the aisles at all times possible.

            But to see it through her eyes, at least a little, is to trace a personal history entwined with Democratic conventions, political history and the role of women in America.

            Rickie marched with the Mississippi Freedom Party at the l964 Convention when the party had refused to seat blacks.  She worked with Martin Luther King in the year before he was assassinated.

            Her daughter was baptized with Ted Kennedy’s son and they attended the same parenting classes.

            She was a delegate at the Miami, Atlanta and New York City conventions years ago.

            When Michelle Obama spoke in Tuscon before the Arizona Primary, she was part of the organizing committee and stood in the rain as a human billboard, wearing an Obama T-shirt and flagging down passers-by.

            When Caroline Kennedy spoke in Toledo, she was among the workers preparing that event as well, staying with her brother while we campaigned in the last l0 days of the Ohio Primary.

            Her connection to this convention is deep and visceral.  She gathers her energy by day to expend it all in the late afternoon and evening.  She chats up her neighbors.  She prodded me to talk to former Kennedy speechwriter Ted Sorenson Monday night, who came to sit beside us and is nearly blind.  (I did so to bring greetings from Bethine Church, and old friend of his and the widow of former Senator Frank Church). 

            And Rickie has been an ardent advocate for women for 50 years. 

            Tuesday’s New York Times featured a long essay by Susan Faludi about the history of women’s suffrage and advancement—or the lack thereof—since women gained the right to vote by Constitutional Amendment 88 years yesterday. 

            Those who say Hillary Clinton supporters should gracefully exit stage right do so at their peril, she wrote, quoting the founder of a pro-Clinton clearinghouse.  Their gloom is rooted in the failure of women to achieve what suffrage promised so long ago.

            The United States ranks 23^rd out of 30 developed nations in its proportion of female federal legislators.  The proportion of state legislators is stuck at around 20 percent.

            The 20 top occupations of women last year were the same as 50 years ago.  Women’s real annual earnings have fallen for the last four years and still noticeably below those of men.

            Faludi quotes suffragette Anne Martin in the l920’s saying “women were exactly where men political leaders wanted them: bound, gagged, divided and delivered to the Republican and Democratic Parties.”  If that perspective is still worth quoting, one party’s as bad as another.

            And so on. All of this from Faludi.

            Women “…still have all the abiding inequities that Hillary Clinton, especially in defeat, symbolized,” she wrote.

            This was, frankly, an eye-opener for me.  It explains those startling poll numbers.  Where once Hispanics were thought to be the swing voters in this election, I think we know what was at stake last night.

            Monday night, for example, I overheard a delegate from Guam trying to persuade a woman at the other end of a phone that Hillary’s time will come and that “she wants us to follow her lead” tonight.  It sounded like a hard sell.

            Rickie’s view yesterday morning was that the “Clinton voter problem” was mostly about one faction winning and the other losing.  She had pushed aside racism early in her life while becoming a committed feminist but hasn’t seen Clinton’s candidacy as the sisterhood’s call to action.  

She’s been emphatically for Obama since December, campaigned for him in five states and made hundreds of calls into Pennsylvania – many of which were discouraging. 

“Women who would vote for McCain are voting against their own best interests.  They’re thinking with their ovaries and not their brains,” she told me.

As I said, it’s a different experience being with her.

That was yesterday morning.

Last night as we listened to Clinton deliver that pitch-perfect speech, Rickie began to cry.  She was completely surprised.  Overwhelmed, I asked her why.

“I’m 70 years old and I will never see a woman president of my country,” she said through her tears.

This mood stayed with her as we watched the hall slowly empty. 

Heading for an exit, we ran into a wall of security and an entourage of some sort pressing through the hallway ahead.  It was the Clintons.

“You were terrific!” Rick yelled repeatedly at Hillary as she slowly passed by.  “You are great!” she said to Chelsea. 

It was sinking in that something momentous had happened with Clinton’s victories in 23 states.  Yet a woman was not going to be president.  At least not yet.

Rickie’s parents lived well into their 90’s. She might live to see a woman president.  But I find myself touched by the force of my wife’s emotions.  I feel something of her loss as well.

How long does Camelot last?

At least one more night.

By now you’ll likely have read reviews of Ted Kennedy’s electrifying appearance at the convention last night or have seen it on television.  For me, it was a moment of personal significance and emotion.

As a young man just one year out of law school, I became legislative assistant to Senator Frank Church of Idaho in October, 1963.  One month later, my wife and I were on the roof of the Mayflower Hotel on Connecticut Avenue watching President Kennedy’s widow pass by with two small children marching at her side.  We were curbside as the horse-drawn coffin of John Kennedy made its slow journey to Arlington Cemetery.

When Robert Kennedy was elected Senator from New York I saw him regularly on the Senate floor and worked with his assistants on legislation.  In the summer of l967, I was back in Church’s Idaho office when Kennedy came to the Fort Hall Indian Reservation exploring the rise of suicides among Native Americans.

I can still see him walking alone along the pavement at the Pocatello Airport, the same solitary image that would later become a famous photo taken in rural Oregon shortly before his death. 

Surely something died in all of us of that generation as both Kennedys and Martin Luther King left us in quick succession. 

So last night that little girl who was walking down Connecticut Avenue on November 22, l963, told us, “I have never had someone inspire me the way people tell me my father inspired them, but I do now: Barack Obama.”  Caroline Kennedy spoke for many of us: all these years later we have a second chance.

I can add little to what you’ve already heard or seen about Senator Kennedy’s appearance except reflect on why it meant a lot to me. 

A candidate for public office in Idaho will run as far away from Ted Kennedy as possible.  He’s been the favorite whipping boy of Republicans for three decades, always good for a scurrilous joke at his expense.  I’ve not made a habit of telling folks I used to work for Ted Kennedy

In the late l970’s, I was staff director for energy at the Joint Economic Committee of the Congress and Kennedy was my chairman.  He controlled the position, interviewed me and put me to work on New England energy issues as well.  With three young kids, I needed a job and persuaded him I could learn something about energy.

Early on I was asked to meet him in Harrisburg, Penn., and fly to Boston for some hearings.  We barely knew each other yet as the small plane pierced the black sky he wanted to talk about the loss of his brothers and the tragedy at Chappaquiddick.  I listened, spellbound and tongue-tied.

I spent many early mornings in briefings at his home and staged hearings which essentially presented an alternative to the “Moral Equivalent of War” energy plan of President Jimmy Carter.  Had his conservation-based, job-creating, alternative-energy plan from 1978 been adopted, even in part, we wouldn’t be in the fix we are today.

Kennedy had a reputation of surrounding himself with the brightest staff and giving them unusual freedom to craft positions within his broad philosophy.  He tried to accomplish so much and was so tightly scheduled that to work for him was to live under constant pressure. 

But then the greatest pressure was that which he placed on himself.  It showed when he ran unsuccessfully for president a couple years later.

Last night’s experience was not nostalgia for deceased Kennedys, which can be easily dismissed by those who are too young or those who never cared for them in the first place.  This was not, however, simply about the distant past.

The Kennedy who was honored last night is a man beloved by his Senate colleagues, Orrin Hatch and John McCain among them.  He is honored not just for his lion heart or his stirring words in times past but for his work as a public servant for more than four decades.  This was the Lifetime Achievement Award, the Jimmy Stewart, Gregory Peck, John Wayne moment.

Kennedy is the longest-serving Senator in American history, a juggler of scores of issues and, as I can testify, a legendary workhorse.  The specific cause may be cancer but another diagnosis might be that he has worn himself out in service.

He is also a kind and caring man.

From the video of his life shown before his speech, I take away the story of the many parents of fallen soldiers whom Kennedy consoled.  “I can still remember where I was when mom and dad heard my brother Joe had been killed in the war,” he would tell them.

Arnold Toynbee wrote that “history is not just one damn thing after another” but when it came to speeches, it began to feel something like that yesterday.  And it was only day one. 

But things picked up with Jesse Jackson, Jr., the thoughtful and convincing praise of Obama by former 30-year Congressman Jim Leach and Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri.  In between was the big band with big voice singers blazing away at stage right.  Folks sure can dance when they’re on camera.  So were Rickie and I up in the rafters.

And then came Teddy and Michelle.  It is hard to imagine how tonight or tomorrow could top that.

For delegates, this convention is an embarrassment of riches.

First comes a blue bag stuffed with promotional giveaways from those who want to bend delegates’ minds:  a pedometer from something called AstraZeneca; ten dollars off my next FedEx shipment; numerous pens, keychains and candies; a box of macaroni and cheese adorned with a donkey holding a “Democrats in 2008!” sign and fitness juice. 

And my favorite: a soft plastic replica of a lump of coal from Peabody Coal, the famous strip-miner and subject of a folk song about the company carrying away West Virginia.  Advertising for “clean coal” is everywhere here.  Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer will be pleased when he arrives to address the convention.

Then there are the newspapers and magazines arriving by the pound outside delegates’ doors:  National Journal, Roll Call, The Hill, The New Republic, Congressional Quarterly.  When is one supposed to read them? 

 The Idaho Democratic Party executive director, Jim Hansen, has given delegates an unusual mission:  collect lots of stuff that can be auctioned off back home at county fund raisers.  That’s what the blue bags are for.  Will the bottle of antibacterial hand sanitizer from the big Washington law firm of Hogan and Hartson be worth anything in Grangeville?

At every corner and in every hallway, it seems, T-shirts, water bottles and an immense variety of buttons are for sale.  My advice is:  wait until Friday.

There are, what, about 4,500 delegates?  Millions upon millions of advertising is aimed at them - a pretty high cost per-delegate.

And I haven’t even gotten to the Pepsi Center where the convention is being held.

Idaho gave Barack Obama the largest margin of victory of any caucus or primaries—80 percent.  From Obama himself to numerous national media, Idaho was credited as the quintessential example of how he outsmarted his opponents and swept to victory: organize in every state and bear down on the caucuses.

Idaho provided Obama with a larger margin of victory than Ohio or Pennsylvania gave Hillary Clinton. 

Is that why the Idaho delegation was seated right below and to the left of the podium?  Well, if so, that distinction is no more.

On Sunday, Delaware was given Idaho’s prized position and the spud state sent into the rafters.  Joe Biden is “the next vice president of the United States,” that’s why.  If he’d chosen Evan Bayh, it would be the Indiana Delegation, with which Idaho and Guam share a hotel 30 minutes south of the convention site, that might have been given new digs.

Idaho delegates seemed not the least disturbed by this Sunday.  Many were dancing the early night away at a spashy party thrown by the Louisiana Delegation at  the Colorado Convention Center to highlight the transformation taking place in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. 

While private parties features celebrities galore all over town, the New Orleans party was the place to be for a couple thousand folks.  Creole cooking was represented by gumbo consisting of beans and rice, crayfish, shrimp and a gumbo consisting, it seemed, entirely of seafood.  Plus a 20 ounce beer labeled specially for the occasion by the California company that makes Full Moon beer..

“I thought I was coming to a lecture,” said delegate Justin Stormogibson of Coeur d’Alene who seemed to be serving as official photographer.  The lecture part consisted of one table handing out literature about initiatives that are transforming the city (it is, for example, flush with chartered and alternative schools that is making it one of the great educational experiments in the country, according to the New York Times Sunday Magazine).

A core band of 12 plus a succession of singers and keyboardist that included, at one time, Randy Newman, happily drowned out all conversation.  Howard Dean made a guest appearance, as did the convention’s organizer, an imposing black woman/minister.  The evening ended with The Saints…what else?

If there’s one thing this convention has in good supply it is impressive black women.  Elizabeth from Los Angeles, whom I met in the Salt Lake Airport, wasted no time telling me that, as a new member of the Democratic National Committee (as of Friday I’ll be Idaho’s national committeeman and a delegate to the DNC) it was my duty to toss out Howard Dean as chairman.  The failure to fully seat Florida and Michigan was his fault, said this Hillary delegate.

This is my first Democratic convention and it’s the summation of six months of political commitment I thought I’d left behind after twice losing races for governor.

I’m back “in” because of Obama.  My wife Rickie and I committed to him early in December, worked his Boise rally and the Idaho caucus hard and campaigned in Nevada, Ohio, Arizona and Oregon. 

For me, this is the most important presidential race since l960 when I couldn’t bring my Republican heart to vote for Richard Nixon and cast my first vote for a Democrat.  My abiding belief that Obama is best suited to reverse the disasterous fall in America’s standing and effectiveness in the world thanks to Bush-Cheney. 

The choice of Biden for vice president couples the charisma Obama exhibited in Europe, Iraq and the Middle East with the serious experience of a 30-year foreign policy veteran. 

The national media have upped the ante for this convention.  A few months back, many of us looked forward to it as a romp, a reward, a prelude to victory.  Obviously the race has tightened.  Yet I don’t sense that delegates share my apprehensions. 

“It will be very close,” said a California congressman told me on the way in way in from the airport. 

This is also my first time blogging and an odd blogger I am, too.  An insider, a former candidate and yet a journalist currently acting as publisher of the weekly Wood River Journal in Hailey and president of the Post Company in Idaho Falls.  I’m figuring it out as I go.

Bloggers are themselves news at this convention.  The New York Times ran a section-front story about The Big Tent, where bloggers will congregate—but only 400 certified major voices will be admitted.  A privileged entry place within a privileged entry place, the convention itself.

The DNC selects one blog for each state, a big deal in blogosphere, for special entre and credentials.  For Idaho that choice was 43^rd State Blues out of Pocatello.   At this morning’s breakfast, Steve Medlin and Darrell Davidson were videoing the proceedings so there ain’t no secrets about who’s saying what.

More about that and a whole bunch more later.

Check postregister.com Monday through Thursday for continuous live coverage from the Democratic National Convention.