So we’ve made the journey from the confines of Studio 3 at WBUR-Boston to the concourse outside Gate 120 in Denver’s Pepsi Center, On Point’s broadcast home for the next four days…
The convention hall inside the Pepsi Center in Denver on Monday morning, August 25.
This morning we were off and running, as the convention center doors were flung open and the chattering classes (that’s us!) were up early chattering away. We’re on the arena’s second floor, in a “booth” on “radio row,” competing for elbow room with the myriad other outlets. (Here are a few photos of our set-up.)
Just before show time, I wandered a few feet around the corner from our set with Liz Halloran of U.S. News & World Report, one of our morning panelists, to check out the convention hall. As we scanned the floor, Liz pointed out that the seating of the state delegations can speak volumes about the party’s geographical priorities and electoral strategy. No surprise then, Liz said, that states like Nevada and Montana — and host state Colorado — have prime floor spots for their delegations. It’s no secret that Obama is trying to win some western states — in recent years no easy task for a Democrat, though that may be changing.
(For more on that possibility, see Huffington Post political editor Thomas Edsall’s piece today on demography and political destiny, and Ryan Lizza’s piece on Colorado Governor Bill Ritter in The New Yorker’s latest issue. They point to new Brookings reports on the “Intermountain West” as a “new swing region” and the rise of new fast-growing metropolitan areas called “Mountain Megas.”)
The big losers in the delegation seating sweepstakes? Oklahoma, Maryland, Oregon, Arizona, among others. They’re up in the nosebleeds.
-John Wihbey
John Wihbey is a producer at On Point.
Tags: Producer's Notebook
Thank you for the update.
Conventions seem like such a bizarre replica of an earlier kind of statehood. At one point in our past, states were incredibly important–they might even leave the union. Today, they seem less so.
I would be interested to hear of any real residual state character in convention delegations, as opposed to the Boston-DC-LA-Chicago America we know so well, where many people bounce around continuously and lack a real state identity.
Posted by Noah, on August 27th, 2008 at 3:04 am EDT