7-10 million Americans live abroad

Rather than give you guys the play-by-play of each of my days at convention, I’m just going to highlight the things I haven’t hit in earlier posts, and then start blogging about non-convention material starting after Labor Day (gosh, I can’t believe it’s September already. Only 65 days until the election! Get those absentee ballots in!)

Getting around Denver:

First of all, let me just say that I learned to navigate Denver better in a week than I’ve learned to get around DC in 3 months. It might have a had something to do with the Freewheelin program, which let you check out a bike for free during the convention. They provided a map, helmet, and lock, and as long as you returned the bike to any Freewheelin station by 7pm, you were good to go. They also had odometers attached to the bikes. I biked around 10 miles total, between Monday and Wednesday. It was great – faster than walking, cheaper than a cab, and so much fun, to boot. The only challenge was that I was wearing convention attire each day. If Dad had seen me pedaling around in a skirt and heels, he would have had a conniption. However, as my reckless behavior didn’t result in the loss of life or limb (the only casualty was one pair of stockings), I pat myself on the back for a job well done.

I posted the quote a few days ago that Democrats fall in love with their candidate, Republicans fall in line behind theirs. Well, I’d just like to say that I think we did a spectacular job falling in line during this convention. At the CDA messaging training (see Flashback), Parag followed this quote by telling us that the average American thinks about politics for five minutes a year. And those aren’t five consecutive minutes, so it’s important that our message be consistent and repeated often.

It really struck me during this convention how many speakers said essentially the same thing. I don’t know if that’s a result of heavy speech-editing by the Obama folks, or if the speakers really are committed to staying on message. Either way, it worked. Of course, there were some highlights (Kucinich’s spirited “Wake up, America!” comes to mind) but the overall impression was one of the same speeches, over and over again. McCain = more of the same. We support our troops. We can’t afford another four years. We need healthcare. The economy sucks. Bill Clinton left Bush in great shape, Bush drove us into the ground. Iraq was a mistake, but we support our troops. We want equal pay for equal work. There are a lot of Republicans and Independents voting for Obama because they know we need change. Did I mention, we support our troops?

Gosh. I could have given a speech at this convention! Those were the basic ideas reiterated by almost every speaker. I guess we’ll see whether it worked over the next few months.

Nothing like hearing that chanted by 80,000 of your closest friends.

I know, I know, everyone wants to hear about The Speech. So I’ll oblige before I go into more detail about the rest of my Thursday.

First of all, I was nervous because the acoustics, at least where I was sitting with CDA behind the podium on the third level up, weren’t great. All the other speakers had been super echo-y and hard to understand, but I guess it was because the crowd was less attentive than when Barack spoke. Somehow it makes for a lot of background noise when 40,000 people are talking to their neighbors and the other 40,000 are answering.

But that Barack, man, he knows how to handle a crowd. It was fairly easy to catch most of what he said, and I was impressed. In the excitement of the moment, I was absolutely swept away, as was everyone else. We were fired up, ready to go, and if he had asked us to storm the White House and do some defenestrating, like in the good old days, we would have carried Mile High Stadium to Washington D.C. and gone at it using our campaign pins as spears.

There was one thing, though, that bothered me after I had time to decompress and think about the speech. As galvanizing as it was, I don’t think it was the kind of speech that would convince undecided voters to help turn their states blue. However, I don’t know if that was the goal of the speech, or if the goal was more to show the hardcore Democrats at and watching the convention a good time. Actually, I guess that’s good for party unity, which is not an insignificant goal, especially in this election.

But shouldn’t trying to sway undecided voters be the main goal behind everything Barack and Biden do from now on? I mean, we’re only 67 days away from the election. It’s at times like these I wish I had more political acumen. Maybe I just haven’t been around the process long enough, but understanding these kind of ulterior motives and political maneuverings with multiple meanings just does not come naturally to me. I’ll ask Lindsey – she’s always super attuned to details like this and happy to explain, which is great. Any thoughts from the peanut gallery, though?

P.S., I know you’re out there – I wondered what was going on when my daily page hits started to shoot up (and by shoot up I mean break into the double digits), and apparently there was a link to my blog on the main Macaulay site during convention. So don’t forget that the whole point of a blog is that it’s interactive! Take that, you old-fashioned and out-of-touch print publications. It’s time for change. Yes we can!

Hopefully you guys are still reading, even though the main attraction is in the post above. Let’s backtrack to Thursday morning, and I’ll give you the lowdown on volunteering at Invesco Field.

Unfortunately, I had to miss Carolyn Maloney’s talk at the DA breakfast, which I was looking forward to because as soon as I change my voter registration to my Hunter address at the dorms, she’ll be my Congresswoman. She’s also the head of the American Citizens Abroad caucus in Congress, and has been really active in about promoting issues important to expats. I was disappointed, I’ve heard a lot of good things about the work she’s doing.

I also didn’t like having to sneak out without saying goodbye to the DA members I know, but Christine (our chairwoman) was taking questions and making announcements, and I didn’t want to be a distraction. Once at Invesco, I made a few friends and checked out the stadium being set up, which looked amazing.

We talked about the difficulty of making the stadium secure, and discussed what a big target we were for our political enemies. Cheery stuff. We also got to hear Stevie Wonder doing a sound check, and I sat in prime seats for all of 10 minutes, knowing it would be the only chance I would get to actually see the front of the stage.

After being briefed and receiving our $10 meal vouchers (which got me all of one mediocre burrito, I kid you not), I got put on VIP line detail, which meant checking credentials and directing traffic in the “fast track” lane for delegates, celebs, and staff. I didn’t see any VIPs I recognized, but I did see a bunch of DNC people I’ve worked with this summer, which was nice.

They were supposed to hook the volunteers up with sunscreen, but that didn’t happen. And I was so mad about my brand new sunscreen being taken away by security on Monday that I refused to buy more. Talk about cutting off my nose to spite my face. Working directly in the sun from 10AM to 5PM with an hour break turned me a delightful shade of fire-engine red.

Schlepping my bags through four airports on my poor shoulders on Friday was a blast, believe you me. But luckily Coke was doing a promotion on Thursday that involved giving out tens of thousands of free, ice-cold Dasani bottles to people waiting to get in the stadium, so at least I kept hydrated. Also luckily, the only real excitement was one medical emergency, which the paramedics took care of pretty quickly. Other than that, it was pretty uneventful.

My team captain was supernice, and when I told her I had friends saving a seat for me, she let me go early (around 6), instead of at 7:30 when the rest of the volunteers went in to see Obama. I was glad, because I got to see Sheryl Crow and Stevie Wonder perform, and Bill Richardson’s Al Gore’s speeches. There were rumors that Bruce Springsteen and Bon Jovi were going to play, but that fell through. Also, the snipers ringing the top of the stadium were a little unsettling. But I somehow managed to get over it.

Now, I absolutely love Al Gore (but then again, how could you not love the Nobel Prize-winning, global warming fighting, powerpoint giver extraordinaire who got screwed by SCOTUS? It’d be like saying you hate Mr. Rogers, or Gandhi). That said, I wasn’t so impressed with his speech. I don’t remember from 2000 (or the Clinton era) if he was an exciting speaker then, but he definitely wasn’t turned on last night. Maybe they should have let him have a graph or two. And a laser pointer.

Highlights from the rest of the night included “the wave” going around the stadium, on all five levels, for a good 10 minutes, and the general overflowing of awesomeness. After Barack’s speech was over and we managed to get out of the stadium (which took walking a good four or five blocks before the crowds thinned enough to be able to breathe) I went to the Texas delegation’s party with some CDA people, and got back to the dorms around 2. I quickly disregarded the idea of packing at that point, so I woke up at 5:30 on Friday to start my trip home.

Parag Mehta, who used to be the director of training at the DNC, had a really great quote in one of his presentations. He said that when the country is gearing up for an election, Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line. I’d just like to say that I’m in love with Bill Clinton. And Hillary Clinton. And Michelle Obama and Joe Biden. And I’m sure come tomorrow night I’ll be in love with Barack. I’d even go so far as to say I’m in love with Dennis Kucinich and John Kerry (who I didn’t even really like all that much in ‘04).

Anyway, as usual, I’m exhausted, and now what, 4 days behind? Something like that. But I guess that’s what layovers are for, eh? I have to switch flights three times on the way back to DC, it should be a blast. In the meantime, though, I still have one more day left of this amazing convention, so you guys will just have to sit tight for a few more days before I can recap the experience.

Before I fall asleep on my keyboard, though, I’d like to dedicate this post to Mike Lamb, who e-mailed me to say he loves my blog. And here I didn’t even know anyone except Fran and Dr. Ugoretz had seen it. So thank you, Mike! As for everyone else, don’t worry about being huge creepers and not letting me know you’ve stopped by. It’s totally cool to have mysterious lurkers.

In other news, Lindsey is basically the best boss ever for totally taking care of me this convention. Seriously, I thought I wasn’t going to be able to get into anything, but she’s been awesome about getting me credentials. Last night it was Death Cab for Cutie tickets. I went with Corey from CDA, who talked us onto the VIP list with an absolutely straight face. So we got to eat hors d’oeuvres and have free drinks and hang out on the VIP level of the club. It was awesome, I wish I could BS like that. It’s such a confidence thing, which I definitely need to work on. Unfortunately, my BSing skillz are limited to making stuff up for class papers, but I guess we all have to start somewhere.

In DemsAbroad news, playing the video at the CDA convention fell through on two distinct occasions, so I ended up having to stand in front of the whole convention at our closing ceremonies lunch and talk about DA/voting from abroad for students who will be overseas this semester. I forgot to say about half of what I wanted to say while I was up there, but Tamia promised they’d send out the VFA video via e-mail to everyone who was registered for convention. So all’s well that ends well, I suppose. Although I definitely have to take a public speaking class or something, because being able to organize my thoughts and speak off the cuff coherently is a skill I’d really like to have.

Seeing all of these amazing speakers at the convention, I wonder how much of it is natural talent and how much of it can be learned. I hope it’s mostly the latter, although I’m sure it most likely varies from person to person. I mean, Joe Biden used to stutter, apparently, and now look at him. Either way, note to self: must remember to add vanquish stage fright and learn how to think on feet to my personal improvement to-do list.

Friday: Went to payless to buy sneakers because I didn’t pack mine. Successfully navigated Denver public transportation. Ended up buying four pairs of shoes. For $50. I’m amazing. Came back to the dorms, went to the CDA community service project, which consisted of weeding and trellising tomato plants at an organic farm. Many dirty jokes about hoeing ensued. I remembered to get and use sunscreen, however, I didn’t think to do my back, and consequently got a nasty burn where my shirt rode up when I bent over while I was picking weeds. So basically I have a tramp stamp sunburn. Pictures are available here (of the whole excursion, not the sunburn):

Showered, went to the Convention Center, registered with CDA, spent a lot of time hanging around being awkward, eventually just sat behind the registration table and pretended I was CDA staff. This is a charade I’ve kept up all week, greatly assisted by the Staff badge Mike bequeathed to me when he needed me to make copies. Have since started hanging out in the CDA staff room, which is misleadingly labeled “DNC Training Room,” for some reason.

Attended CDA opening ceremonies, gave my contact information to Jackie (who runs the internship program and basically the whole DNC) on the off-chance she’d take pity on me and give me office credentials (which she didn’t, hasn’t, and probably won’t), and listened to a couple of CDA speeches, including Howard Dean.

Bailed on CDA party for state staff party I organized for Lindsey, which was fun. Met Mary McCall, who is hilarious, cool, and my new favorite person in DA, which are not mutually exclusive qualities. Got terrible blisters from one of my new pairs of shoes, which was unfortunate as it was the first day of convention. Bummer. The other pairs of shoes seem to be okay, much to my delight.

Saturday: Met Mary and Lindsey at the Red Lion at 9AM to put together welcome packets for our delegation. Much hilarity ensued. Missed out on a free CDA breakfast at the Women’s Caucus, but got to the convention center in time to snag a lunch and go to some trainings. I hit “Writing a Speech and Framing a Message,” “Successful Fundraising,” and “Mobilizing through New Media.” All were interesting, but the messaging one was the best, because it was run by Parag, who does amazing trainings.

Following that, I got a little lost on the way to the Meditate 08 opening ceremonies, but eventually made it. Heard a rumor Gov. Dean’s wife was there, but I have no idea what she looks like, so I can’t confirm that. The event was at the Denver Aquarium, which is kind of out of the way from the rest of downtown, but it was a nice walk crossing the Platte river. Only stayed for about an hour though, both because it was too crowded and very uncomfortable, and because it started to feel very cult-ish, what with all the chanting and talk of being one family.

Had really good Mexican for dinner by the aquarium, and took a cab back to the convection center/CDA office around 8. Met Mike, who was dealing with the never-ending housing crises. We talked about going to parties, but ended up just going out for dinner by the University of Denver. Then I hung out in his and Jason’s room until the wee hours, doing DA work while they worked on straighting out the rooming situation. Helped them sneak in several people over the course of the week – I know, I live on the edge.

Let’s see, you’ve already got the first half of Sunday, so look forward to posts about Sunday afternoon/night and Monday coming up soon.

Well, today has been chock-full of excitement. I’d just like to say that I don’t think I’ve ever been more tired in my life. Actually, I’m sure that’s not true, because there’s nothing I like better than pushing myself to the brink of exhaustion when on a deadline, so I’m sure I was more tired than this during finals. But I am pretty damn tired. Also, guess when I have to be up tomorrow? Yep, that’s right, 5:45. Why DA has to have breakfast meetings at 7:45 in the morning is beyond me. Why it takes 45 minutes to get from the dorms to the hotel is also a mystery. However, I’ve given up questioning why it takes me an hour and 15 minutes to get ready in the morning. It just does. I just have to accept that.

Anyway, this morning I woke up with the intention of going to the CDA brunch with the Mayor of Newark, NJ, Cory Booker. But alas, I decided having straight hair for the demsabroad meeting this afternoon was more important to me. And then I fooled around online for a while looking up events to go to while downtown. So I didn’t end up leaving the dorms until around 12:30. I know, pathetic.

My plan was to go to the Denver 2008 Convention Marketplace, but I got sidetracked on the way. As I was getting off the lightrail (aka metro aka train), I saw another fair/festival type thing, which turned out to be the Green Frontier Fest, which I had also wanted to go to, but was putting off because it’s going on all week, while the Marketplace was only for today. But I couldn’t just walk past it.

So I walked around the GFF, which was very educational. I also got a lot of free crap. I’m such a sucker for free stuff. I think I ended up with 4 bags, several samples of products I’m never going to use, and a couple of pens. I’ll take a full inventory of all the free stuff I’ve gotten from the convention when I get back to DC. Anyway, I digress. My main objective was trying to find some free food, however, all I managed was a slice of organic bread with organic blueberry jam. It was good, but rather unfulfilling, since I hadn’t eaten at all yet. Pretty unfortunate, all in all. But I did have some free sample hemp ice cream, which was surprisingly delicious. Who knew? When I think of hemp I think of those bracelets we used to make at camp, but thankfully the ice cream didn’t taste like that.

I could have made out like a bandit with nutrition bars, but personally, I think they’re disgusting. Also, they tend to have stuff in them like walnuts and almonds and hazelnuts, all of which I’m allergic to. You just never know. (I wanted to get a shirt I saw that said “I’m allergic to Republicans” because, really, I’m allergic to everything else, and at least it would cheer me up when I have bad reactions to things because I’m not careful and don’t ask what’s in them, but they were expensive. And by expensive I mean like 20 bucks. But with all the t-shirts I plan on getting for free, it pains me to pay money for one.)

So still hungry, but with several extra pounds of loot, I headed to my original destination, the first street fair. I got sidetracked again, though, by the convention center, when I stopped in to make sure everything was a go for playing the VFA video at tonight’s rally. And I ended up talking to other DNC interns/hanging with college dems for like 45 minutes, which severely cut into my fair time, unfortunately. But I eventually made it, and was able to give it a quick runthrough (and buy some presents) before I had to leave for the DA meeting at the delegation’s hotel. And I was on time, which is a rarity for me! Lateness is probably my number one vice. But I’ll dissect that character flaw in another post, once this crazy convention is over.

And I’m over my self-imposed word limit for this post, so I’ll just have to leave you guys hanging. I know, disappointing. However, I feel like long posts are not conducive to keeping your attention. So stay tuned for the rest of the day’s adventures.

I’m blogging live from Colorado at the College Democrats of America Convention, which is taking place before the DNCC. I apologize for the lack of posting before this, but last-minute convention preparations monopolized my time earlier this week, and I left for Denver on Thursday, thus joining the ranks of the huge blogger corps that will be covering this convention. Hopefully I’ll be able to manage an original thought or two, but let’s not get our hopes up too high.

I was discussing blogging with a couple of the other College Dems who are also doing blog projects for their schools, and we agreed it makes us feel a bit cliché. Like, “Oh, of course you have a blog – so does everyone else who thinks they’re more interesting than they actually are.” Or maybe that’s just my own anti-blogger bias.

Either way, it’s a weird task, with a fuzzy job description. I mean, if this were my personal blog (oh, this is making me nostalgic for my angsty Livejournal days), I’d be raking myself across the coals for not being outgoing enough and not trying hard enough to have fun, but I’m sure that doesn’t make the cut as appropriate discourse for an academic blog. On the other hand, who wants to read a laundry list of what I did today, with nothing personal to spice it up? I don’t even want to write that, much less read it.

I guess I’ll just have to try for a happy medium. Which is made more difficult by the fact that I’m so tired my eyes are crossing. Rather than recap, then, which is making me nod off just thinking about it, let me give you a brief overview of tomorrow, and then go to sleep and try to catch up on what I’ve done so far at some point in the near future. Tomorrow: I will be meeting the DemsAbroad delegation for the first time, which is super exciting, because so far I’ve e-mailed with these people ad nauseum, talked to them on the phone, heard countless stories about them from Lindsey, but have never met them face to face. So I’m looking forward to that.

I also have to figure out how to get our viral video played at the CDA (College Democrats of America) rally tomorrow night. Apparently a wireless connection ad the convention center is $420, so watching the video on youtube clearly isn’t going to happen. As Lindsey pointed out, it would have been nice to know this before we left DC, so we could have burned a DVD with the video and brought it with us, but if wishes were horses…Anyway, Lindsey told me to e-mail Jodi, our press person, to see if she has a high res copy of the file. So fingers crossed.

I also have to get one of our delegates registered for the Delegate community service project, which of course registration is closed for online. But I will make some calls tomorrow to the Democrats Work people, to see if we can figure something out. They’re the ones that also organized the CDA volunteer project, which involved working on an organic farm for an afternoon. But that’s another story.

We had a fire drill at the DNC this morning. It was a nice change of pace – remember in elementary school when fire drills were SO COOL because you got to miss class for a few minutes? And you knew there wasn’t really a fire, but you still worried about what would happen to the class pet in the back of the room. Or at least, I always did. The principal used to time us, and announce the time on the PA system after we were back in the building. It was such a big deal if everyone got out faster than the last time. Nothing like that at the DNC, though. Although something that did baffle me were the number of people who took their coffee with them.

Nothing like a nice hot cup of joe while your office goes up in flames, I always say.

This morning has been full of answering e-mails, doing a fun coloring project, and writing a letter inviting Democrats Abroad from Oregon to a conference call with the Democratic candidate for Senate, Jeff Merkley. The coloring project involves finding an editable map online, manipulating the colors so each region is a different hue, and sending it to the Obama staff in charge of hiring field workers for each region. It’s a nice break from the e-mails from angry, angry people about the fact that our website and/or contribution page is broken more often than not.

Also I need to call the bank and figure out why they charged us over $200 to cash a check from Canada that was mixed in with our U.S. checks. However, it was clearly from an account with U.S. funds, not Canadian dollars. That’s another fun part of the job, dealing with all sorts of foreign currency. It makes the bank kind of hate us, so this is obviously an ill-disguised attempt at retribution.

In other news, international calls coming in to our phones sometimes distort callers’ voices so they sound like Darth Vader.

“::::Pant, pant::::How do I register to vote? ::::Pant::::I am youhr fahthahhr::::”

“What? Let me call you back”

“I said, I’m for Obama.”

Well, Lindsey is in Chicago, and I’m in D.C., and I’m super hungry. She e-mailed me at 11:33 am saying that she’d call me soon, so I didn’t go to lunch, for fear of being out of the office when she called. But it is now 3:16 pm, and I haven’t heard from her. Am considering making a run to Subway, but with my luck, in the 10 minutes it takes to go around the corner and grab a sandwich, she’ll call.

I know, thrilling stuff. I can tell you’re all waiting with bated breath to see if I’ll succumb to the hunger pangs.

In the meantime, though, I thought I’d give a brief introduction to what I do here on a daily basis. Feel free to visit the DA Wikipedia page , maintained by our fantastic press secretary, Jody Couser, to learn more about the organization in general. (And no, it never ceases to amuse me that we have the same initials as another one of my favorite groups.)

Most of my time lately has been taken up by planning our delegation’s experience at the Democratic National Convention (which has been given the acronym DNCC, so not to be confused with the DNC, the Democratic National Committee. Don’t ask me what the extra C stands for, I have no idea). Since the DNC considers DemsAbroad a state party, just like NY or any of the other 50, we get to send a delegation to the convention. We have 22 delegates, each with a half vote. And we’re not complaining about it, either! Take that, Florida and Michigan.

So I’ve been gathering everyone’s travel information, chasing down speakers for our Delegation Breakfasts every morning of the convention (today I’m trying to book Jimmy Carter…yes, that Jimmy Carter), making sure transportation from the airport to the hotel will be available, organizing venues for events, and trying to manage other logistical nightmares.

A typical day also includes answering e-mails submitted from the help page on www.democratsabroad.org, which is always an adventure. Today I had to figure out how a woman in Belgium could get replacement Social Security cards for herself and two kids. I also do a lot of telling people how they can vote (www.votefromabroad.org, of course!), and answering questions like, “The Obama site doesn’t ship outside the U.S.! How do I get my Obama bumper sticker/pin/t-shirt?” or “I’m traveling around the world, and will be visiting several countries in October and November. I don’t know exactly where I’ll be or when. Where should I have the Board of Elections send my absentee ballot?!”

The tough ones I forward to our voter registration issues team, but most I try to handle myself. The answers to the above, by the way, are 1) It depends on your country – some of our larger of our country committees are selling Obama chum locally – but otherwise, your best bet is to have a friend order the merchandise and ship it to you and 2) Register with your permanent mailing address on www.votefromabroad.org, but fill out and mail in the Federal Write-In Absentee Ballot from wherever you are by Oct. 4th.

Wow, two posts in two days. Let’s see how long I can keep this up!