All my kidding about the foreign press and how they get treated at political convention aside, I have much respect for how the foreign press treats others.

In this picture you see the “writing stands” set up next to podium at the Pepsi Center.  These are paid seats reserved months ago by media organizations that allow you to watch the convention and file reports live without having to run back to the tents. They were the best seat in the house - and we didn’t have any.

But we did, uh, “borrow” them frequently, always from the foreign press who we knew had deadlines that fell anywhere from 7-14 hours ahead of hours.  Hey, it’s a dog-eat-dog world, and you gotta do what you gotta do. As you might imagine, this became harder and harder to do as the convention heated up. We got caught a couple times and and in each case but one, the foreign reporters were not only cool with it, but we shared great conversation and traded business cards.  A special shout out to the guys at Der Spiegel, NHK Japan and Asahi Shimbun for helping me and Del Walters out.

The French? Well that’s another story…

If all you’ve seen is this blog, you’ve missed a bunch - slide shows by Dudley Brooks, galleries by Valerie Goodloe, perspective from Del Walters and DeAngelo Starnes.

But what you don’t see are the people who stayed in Chicago and made it all make sense for presentation to you dear readers.

So special kudos to Linda Johnson Rice, our CEO, for sending us and giving EbonyJet.com the opportunity. Senior Editor Terry Glover for running the show while I was gone, National Sales Director Debra White for getting it all paid for, Brandi Davis for keeping the design of the Convention 08 section coherent, and to Lenora Blackamore for keeping the technology going so people could actually see it all.

There were other breakthroughs during the convention. On the sponsorship side the new media companies has a HUGE presence, brought on by that fact that the last national convention (the RNC in 2004) credentialed a toal of 20 bloggers.

This time, Google and Digg.com’s Big Tent and the MySpace cafe hosted more than 500 bloggers, while Microsoft, in its Specialty Media Lounge, hosted nearly 300 minority media companies in their room in the Denver Convention Center, where people got to drink coffee, eat free lunch and use the good graces of Microsoft to plug in their Macs.

But this was also the very first convention where there was significant and visible sponsorship by Black-owned companies, most prominently a company little known outside of political circles - The Perennial Strategy Group, a lobbying firm based in Washington that represents Major League Baseball’s umpires among others.

The firm presented a series of parties/performances each night of the week, all under a theme of “Party with a Purpose”. From Sunday thru Wednesday night, those parties were decidely majority African American, with small pockets of diversity, small enough to be noticed as standouts.

On Thursday after the speech, however, in a large tent across from the Denver Hyatt, Perennial party featuring DC Biz Markie and performances by the Black Eyed Peas (with a drop-in from Herbie Hancock) and John Legend, was dramatically different from the rest.

Maybe it was the central location, maybe it was the free Ciroq vodka, but this time the party was wildly diverse. not only in the makeup of the audience, but in the attitude of the crowd as well. This was not just co-mingling in segregated clumps, there were real active attempts by everyone to introduce themselves to people who looked different, to start conversations, to trade contact information.

If only for the length of the show, people were taking a lesson and making change happen themselves.

Rather than lifting the gates around the stadium and letting everyone find their best way home, Denver police chose to keep the departure equally as controlled as the entrance. Denver’s Colfax Street, a main thoroughfare that travel East/West was closed off to traffic from Invesco to downtown and became the default exit for those traveling on foot.

After climbing a fairly steep and treacherous hill at the foot of a viaduct, thousands of event-goers took the mile and a half walk down the dimly-lit Colfax toward the Denver Convention Center and to points beyond. Others took hotel shuttles or filed out on the stadium northeast end to the $80 private parking spaces.

The stadium floor after the delegates left the stadium.

The camera platform, post-speech.

If you were not standing on the platform with the press, you would have missed one particular moment that seemed to cement the fact this the the night at Invesco Field was a real point on history that was important beyond its significance to Black history. It seemed to be a moment that all American was looking for.

That particular moment was the final prayer after the speech and fireworks subsided. There was a prayer at the end of every convention session during the week, and without exception the press used the announcement of the prayer as a signal to bolt out of the room and get back to work, or to the martini bar, whichever was closest.

This night, however, was remarkably different. When the it was time to bow heads, everybody bowed, including the press. I’m only two steps from a heathen, but there was God in that moment, and even the most jaded people seemed to recognize it. It was clear symbol that for Blacks, Whites Hispanics and Asians, race and ethnicity has been a burden that people are desperate to lift from their shoulders. And at least for the rest of the night, people acted as if it had been lifted.

There was some worry that after a four hour program, which despite the excitement did have its duller moments, the crowd might be worn out with the anticipation and only mildly enthused when Obama finally took the stage.

There was nothing to worry about. The moment delivered on the hype and then some. But objectively, it was the presence and spectacle of it all that carried more emotion than the speech itself. Which is not to criticize the speech, just to recognize the impact of the collective energy of 85,000 souls - men, women, children - who had made a pilgrimage of sorts to the coming of a new America.

Obama’s statement that the moment ” is not about me, it’s about you” was entirely on target, even it it was the politically expedient thing to say. I got a crop of e-mails as Obama was speaking asking me for my feelings, I would have to say that above all there was within the stadium a universal feeling of crossing a bridge after a long and painful journey. We were not quite home yet, but everyone seemed to sense that we were a lot closer than we’ve ever been.

Does it sound like cheerleading to say the speech was a spiritual moment? Again, not the words but “the moment” of it all. Similar to the day Mandela was released from prison, there was in the air a palpable aura of imminent change for America. Whether Obama is the change or the just the catalyst the sparks one is yet to be seen. But if you turned around from watching Obama and looked deeply into the audience, you quickly realized that the change we are all looking for had happened in the stands long before Obama came on stage.

The question facing us is do we all require an Obama to lead us there, or are we brave enough to make the changes ourselves? We are the change we seek, indeed.

Bernice King addresses the crowd at Invesco Field at Mile High

In the earlier post about about Jesse Jackson, I mentioned the underground buzz from a vocal crowd of the usual old school suspects about what they perceived to be the lack of significant visible connection to the history of the moment, specifically the proper recognition of the 45th anniversary of the March on Washington. But while Jesse Jackson took a positive spin on the history, others saw it as a new opportunity to attack Obama, while still claiming to publicly support him.

But in fact there was. The morning of the Big Speech, a prayer breakfast at the Denver Convention Center with LeVar Burton as the MC featured a number of speakers but most dramatically the Rev. Joseph Lowery who delivered a firestorm of a sermon/speech that brought the crowd to tears and even made Ted Koppel, who covered the event, a little misty. But the ceremony was sparsely attended relative to the number of Black delegates and attendees populating the halls of the Pepsi Center on any given day during the week. Certainly fewer people than the big black people party the night before given by the CBC.

Beyond that, the Rev. Bernice King, Martin Luther King III and Rep. John Lewis held a prominent position at the top of the Invesco Field program, following a touching video tribute to King that received loud applause from the diverse crowd. How much more did the “not enough” crowd expect?

In the afterglow of the speech and on panels during the convention,  Julianne Malveaux, Michael Eric Dyson and Cornel West were highly critical of Obama and his staff for not using his platform to aggressively addressing issues from reparations to Darfur to black liberation. But is that a legitimate argument given Obama’s position.

There are dozens of issues that Obama did not address in the speech, but that was not the purpose of the speech. His job on Thursday was to re-introduce himself to the American public (12% of who still think he is a Muslim) and to break down two years of visionary language into a bullet-pointed outline of fundamentals  that spoke to the bottom line in American households.  National security, the economy and the pocketbook were the themes he needed to hit and everything else feeds into those broad categories. His agenda was to, simply and plainly, come off as credibly presidential as a black man in still majority white America.

To turn the speech into a screed on black liberation would have been foolhardy and suicidal.

But the whole history and issue thing was just a jumping off point for what the real problem was. In bars and at lunch tables all during convention week, it only took a couple of Crown Royals to get people saying what they really felt and repeatedly Obama was criticized for his lack of familiarity with the elder generation of civil rights and political operatives. It was cast as a fundamental failing of the Obama and his campaign.

But is about Obama’s failure or is it about a basic resentment that when issues of public policy are discussed, the likes of Dyson, West, Tavis Smiley and others are not consulted on their opinions. Could the issue be that Susan Rice, Valerie Jarrett, Spencer Overton and a host of Obama’s advisors - black and white- are not on the “approved” list of black intellectuals.

What seems at the core of the anti-Obama criticism really is the issue of who is at the table when decisions are made and who is not, and a steadfast refusal to admit that there is a generation of of intellectuals, analysts and thinkers who fall outside of the League of Usual Suspects.

Should Obama not be criticized by his supporters? Of course not. He’s fair game and the people who are on his side should be the first to keep him on track. But certain folk need to be honest about their agendas. Obama is 60 days or so from likely being the next president. If you haven’t gotten a personal phone call by now, you need to loosen the ego and buy your own ticket on the train before it completely leaves the station.