7-10 million Americans live abroad

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.