Obama Packs The House In Denver

In Denver this morning, something took place that seemed a lot like a time-warp flash-forward to the Democratic National Convention, which isn't supposed to be coming here until the end of August. This morning the Obama campaign held a rally at the University of Denver that caused traffic jams that made the highways look like a mini-version of the nightmare Los Angeles 405! In the end, I parked in someone's driveway. Others were just parking on lawns around the city campus. Preliminary reports were putting the crowd at something like 10,000 people. Lines started before 7 am and snaked all around the campus, literally around whole city blocks. It was clear by 8:30 am when they opened the doors to Magness Arena that we weren't all going to get a seat. So they shuttled us into overflow sections. Half the overflow crowd-- thousands of us--filed into the Arena gym and the rest were seated in the lacrosse field outside, snow piles from last week still rimming the edges of the grass.

Waiting for the doors to open, I started asking people why they came out, whether it was their first time to a political rally, etc. The response was always pretty much the same: "Are you kidding me, fool? Look around you?" People talking to one another in the crowd were all saying things like: "Can you believe this?" and "This is insane!"

And it was. This thing was no political rally, not like any of the political rallies I've ever been to in my life. This was no Dukakis rally. This was no Clinton rally, whatever they say. It was different.

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