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By Moe Lane Posted in Democrats | Is Denver Burning? | The Best Democratic Primary EVER — Comments (26) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Seeing this blog entry on Recreate 68 and their plans for the Denver convention, I did a bit more in the way of searching for news on what's supposed to be going down there. A mild amount of digging came across this video:

Recreate '68

(Via Slapstick Politics; check out also The Drunkablog, who has apparently been personally insulted by Ward Churchill.)

...which is a roundtable between Denver Councilman Charlie Brown and Recreate 68 spokesman (said with malice aforethought) Glenn Spagnuolo. It's both somewhat long and not particularly sexy, but you should watch it anyway. Particularly if you're somebody telling yourself the fairy tale that the streets of Denver will flow milk and honey once the DNC nominates that nice Senator Obama.

Read on.

To summarize: the Denver city government is not the happiest of campers. There's a likely revenue shortfall looming - in what was (as far as I can tell*) the only mention of the actual candidates, Councilman Brown complained that both campaigns were too busy fighting each other to pass along any financial assistance - and Denver is apparently becoming more and more exasperated with the protesters, who are planning to descend in the tens of thousands upon a city with no spare hotel space AT ALL and a positive disinclination to just let them sleep in the parks.

This issue took up a good chunk of the interview, with complaints about the permitting process coming a close second, and Spagnuolo's continuing refusal to declaratively state that the protesting groups will obey the law bringing up the rear. Spagnuolo (as is usual for a member of the organized antiwar movement) either doesn't seem to understand that the First Amendment doesn't actually give him the right to guaranteed housing on vacations/business trips; or else does understand, but knows that screaming about his rights will get him sympathetic ink somewhere. Hard to tell, really - at any rate, he wants his people to have the "right" to sleep in the parks, he hinted that they're going to confront the cops when they come to roust them out, and you get the feeling that the press release screeching about "police brutality" is already written and on somebody's hard drive.

So: par for the course, I hear you cry. Not... precisely.

There's been speculation of what might happen in the Denver streets if Senator Clinton gets the nomination. At this moment in time, Senator Obama has a technical lead in delegates, but absent either a wholesale surge in super-delegate support, or a meteor hitting Clinton, neither candidate will have enough delegates to win on the first ballot, and Chaos and Old Night will descend upon the Pepsi Center if it goes to a second ballot. Should Clinton eventually win, one line of thought is that the protesters outside will go reliably nuts and trash the city... which should not be a factor in deciding who gets the nomination, but probably would be, anyway.

Interestingly, the above interview suggests that Denver's going to get the trashing anyway. Nobody talked about the Bush administration, nobody talked about Bush himself, nobody even mentioned either Clinton or Obama by name. Spagnuolo came across as being permanently offended by the Democratic Party in general; and while Senator Obama is easily the most palatable candidate of the two available to him and his, I am hardly confident in the antiwar movement's ability to know when to quit when they're ahead. Put another way; I am no longer confident that nominating Obama will forestall riots in the streets. I am starting to consider the possibility that it won't actually matter who gets the nomination, in fact. It could be Al Gore with Dennis Kuchinich as his VP, and they'll still end up throwing garbage cans through McDonalds' plate glass windows.

That's... going to change a lot of assumptions. Starting with what we can expect to realistically accomplish in the Mountain West this November.

Moe Lane

*I was listening for references to the GOP and/or any national politician's name, but there were at least three examples of crosstalk and I don't have a transcript.