Denver 2008 -- 'America, we cannot turn back. Not with so much work to be done.'

Denver -- Forty five years ago, I heard the first great speech of my adult life, standing on the Mall in Washington, DC, when Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his great "I have a dream speech." By luck I was at my first political convention when Mario Cuomo described America as a "City on a Hill." Four years ago, in Boston, I looked down from the Fleet Center to see a young candidate I had met weeks earlier when the Sierra Club endorsed him for the U.S. Senate seat from Illinois electrify the crowd -- Larry King walked the corridors afterward muttering out loud to himself, over and over, "My, my, my, my. My, my, my."

So I've been very lucky in the speeches I've heard in person. And I was lucky again last night, at Invesco Field, when that still young U.S. Senator passionately echoed Martin Luther King's call to redeem the American promise. And the entire evening was a reminder of just how much has changed in the past eight years. Obama himself devoted more energy to global warming, energy, and the environment in one speech than the entire 2000 or 2004 campaigns saw, and just before he spoke Al Gore reminded us again that "inconvenient truths matter."

It seemed to me that Obama and the Democrats missed only one opportunity -- they linked him and his biography and this moment to Abraham Lincoln, and they took back from Ronald Reagan the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy. But in his remarks on Bush's foreign policy of bullying without delivering, I did wish that Obama had taken Teddy Roosevelt back from the Republicans -- for surely one way of summing up the Bush administration is to "speak loudly and carry a small stick."

And it was delicious to watch a Sierra Club member and volunteer -- Marsha Shearer -- backstage with Obama in her Sierra Club "New Energy for America" T-shirt.

Denver 2008 -- By Acclamation

Denver -- Last night when Hillary Clinton moved to make the nomination of Barack Obama unanimous, it was clear (as it was when she made her speech the day before, and when Bill Clinton made his impassioned call for the election of Obama earlier in the evening) that the Democratic party is coming together -- whether the media likes it or not. One of the remarkable things about being with the delegates this week is that the buzz about the Hillary-Barack split has been vastly less than the media's emphasis on it would indicate. Unity, it appears, doesn't sell papers.

Another kind of unity was on display at the bloggers' "Big Tent," as John Podesta, T. Boone Pickens, and I agreed that we could not solve our nation's energy problems by drilling and that, as I put it, the current political emphasis on whether or not to open up more of the coastline to drilling is a Karl Rove-style "head fake." 

I think Pickens is real -- but he is a conservative Republican, so there are lots of skeptics out there.

But one of the big issues swirling around the Pickens plan is that  much of our current natural gas production is irresponsible and poorly located and regulated (although Pickens is not calling for an increase natural gas production). So, after the event, the blogging community was focused on that issue, as well as on how to break the gridlock that is blocking progress on energy. You can watch the interview with the bloggers here.

Denver 2008 -- Getting Ready to Govern

Denver -- What is making this week so intense that I literally didn't have time to post yesterday is not the formal work of the Convention -- there's not much suspense, and the real work is being done by the delegates and the campaign staff.  But what is happening around this Convention -- to a degree unique in my experience -- is that the Democrats are getting ready to govern next January.  The array of policy workshops, debates, and forums is staggering. In Boston four years ago there were three environmental events during the entire Convention ; in Denver, there are six or seven a day.  The Denver Post ran a blog about this phenomenon, contrasting the made-for-television spectacle that is the formal sessions with this intense policy prep work going on:

"In sharp contrast, the afternoon roundtables and work sessions that aren’t aired on television have probed serious issues ranging from the changing demographics and politics of The West, which The Post covered in an editorial Tuesday, to a lively and thoughtful 'Rocky Mountain Roundtable on Energy and Climate Change' that ran more than two hours Tuesday."

The most important speech at the Energy and Climate Change Roundtable was given by Lord Nicholas Stern, who told an audience that included Democratic Governors, Senators, Congressmen and Mayors that mounting scientific evidence available to the British government makes it clear that time for action is even shorter than the IPCC has projected, and that action has to be clearer and stronger.

Then there was the fascinating process of watching  T. Boone Pickens begin enlisting the heads of America's major labor unions to support his campaign to slash our dependence on foreign oil by fast-tracking wind and solar power and a national grid, and then using the natural gas freed up by these changes as CNG in motor vehicles.  There are obvious incongruities in this process -- Pickens is, after all, a conservative Republican -- but there were also some very powerful synchronous currents -- and Boone was once a union member, when he worked for the Union Pacific Railroad.

Later today I'll be appearing with Boone and John Podesta of the Center for American Progress, and more important, the likely head of Obama's Transition Team if Obama wins in November.  But this is already a Convention like no other -- getting ready to govern while dealing with the sober reality that this is shaping up as a brutally tight Presidential election.