The Texas Observer

Observer photographer Steve Satterwhite spent the afternoon at the Duncanville Library polling place on Main Street inn Duncanville, Texas, near Dallas, where he took the following photos and conducted interviews.

Marianne Hemphill, an independent travel agent from Duncanville who voted early and worked the polls today, told him: “My eyes just popped open this morning, and I was so excited—Election Day! I think almost everybody in Duncanville voted early, and so the last-minute voters will be happy when they get off work today and find short lines. I am so excited because this is just a history-making moment. We had a woman running for president and an African-American running for president, and we should be proud of that. This has never happened before, and so we should be so excited, and we know that things are going to be really exciting tomorrow morning. And as a black woman I am so proud that Barack has made it this far.”

It’s entirely possible that news might happen today, but it’s less clear who’ll be around to report it, since the order of the day is BarackObama’s much-anticipated speech tonight at Invesco Field. Party people are estimating a 4-hour process — doubtless riddled with snafus — for getting into the stadium, and that’s if James Dobson’s peevish prayer for rain goes unanswered.

Given the tightness of security and the unthinkable prospect of being left out in the parking lot, we’re not even going to try to bring our laptops along.

Then again, being left out might not be the worst thing that could happen. A timing miscalculation last night at the Pepsi Center left one Observer reporter stuck so high in the Pepsi Center’s nosebleed seats — directly behind the stage, no less — that it was simply impossible to hear, never mind see, the evening’s speeches. So we abandoned the interior and went out into the hall and found a big flat-screen TV, maxed out its volume, and settled in on the carpet to watch the feed.

We weren’t the only ones, and we suspect we had a better view than most. From inside the hall, for instance, we never would have seen Texas Congressman Chet Edwards’ unfortunately canned smile, which, we suspect, had more than a little to do with the fact that he didn’t make it past Obama’s VP short-list.

Joe Biden, of course, did, and the sense around the big screen was that he knocked his acceptance speech out of the park. And when Obama unexpectedly joined him, well, the Hall and the hallway both went wild.

Plus, there was one undeniable advantage to our position. Once the speeches were over, as the Pepsi Center emptied to the soft sounds of the traditional closing invocation, we found ourselves almost directly in the flight path of the secret service crews hustling Hillary and Bill Clinton (who’d exceeded high expectations earlier in the evening) out of their box seats and into a waiting catering-staff elevator. Both of them walked within 10 feet of us, turning heads and setting off a flurry of hurried shutter-snapping. They’re shorter in real life than you might think, and have larger heads than you’d expect, as if they had been manufactured specifically to camera-ready specs.

It was as unexpectedly close to this convention’s real deals as we’ve been all week.

Texas state Sen. Leticia Van de Putte, one of three female co-chairs of Denver’s Democratic National Convention (a record, at this multiply historic gathering), gavelled the proceedings to order today at 3 p.m. After a few formalities, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi kicked off the Presidential Nominating Process — the actual bread and butter, business-wise, of the week’s proceedings. Clinton and Obama both were nominated and seconded, followed by the start of the roll call vote.

A note on the roll call vote. Some Texas delegates were apparently surprised by a campaign-brokered agreement to conduct the vote via paper ballot at the delegation’s hotel this morning, rather than conduct the actual balloting on the floor. What difference, if any, the location of the balloting makes appears to be moot, as the roll call is taking place on the floor as this is written, as usual. There’s plenty of opportunity to rhetorically recognize those now-familiar 18 million cracks Sen. Clinton’s historic campaign inscribed in this country’s ultimate glass ceiling.

As the Democratic National Convention enters its second day in Denver, party leaders are amping their message into overdrive: Unity, Unity, Unity. Sure, party leaders say, the conflict-obsessed media would prefer to sell you a narrative about the deep divisions between camps Obama and Clinton, but the party line — trumpeted everywhere from delegate breakfasts to front-page punditry — is one of former rivals coming together for the larger good, the larger good being defeating John McCain.

That focus is especially important here on Tuesday, with Clinton herself scheduled to close the night’s program of speeches at the Pepsi Center at 8:30. What will she say? And more important: Will the 30 percent of her supporters that polls claim would rather vote for McCain than Obama listen?

Some surely will, but others, not so likely. A feisty trio of the latter variety was walking down the sidewalk in front of the caucus-hosting Colorado Convention Center this morning when they apparently overheard a reporter asking for directions to a planned pro-Hillary march scheduled for near noon. The most assertive of the three Clinton-clad women grabbed the reporter’s sleeve and asked a favor.

“Are you with the press? I want you to tell your viewers, or readers, or whatever, that there are a lot of women here who are not going to get over it.” The media, she said, had given Obama a free ride, and were ignoring the real story of Hillary’s fight-to-the-end contingent.

Really? the reporter wondered aloud. The major narrative of the entire convention, the one party leaders insist is a media invention, is being underreported?

That’s right, the woman said, and the scorned Hillary-ites beside her nodded in agreement, scowling as if they’d found the one media member among the estimated 15,000 in Denver this week most personally responsible for the slight.

The reporter promised that he was on his way to a pro-Hillary march to gauge and convey exactly the sentiment the women apparently found so lacking in convention coverage. The march is planned for 11:45 on Colfax Avenue near the state capitol. The reporter is headed that direction now.

When he gets there, he expects to find more disgruntled Hillary supporters venting their anger, buttonholing presumptively dismissive (but present) reporters, and generally not getting over it. And if this is what he finds, and if he reports it as such, he fully expects to find himself blamed by party leaders on tomorrow’s news for concentrating too gleefully on intra-party dissent.

Such are the competing agendas on parade in Denver this week.

Comedian Paul Mecurio took advantage of a long line outside the California Street entrance to the DNC credentials office to add a touch of levity to the borderline heatstroke that had some would-be convention attendees battling distemper.

After mock-interviewing one such about “how it felt” to share a girlfriend with the presidential hopeful-turned-bad joke, Mecurio asked the couple’s better half if her presumptive affair with Edwards was “in remission” before handing over a (fully dressed) Barbie doll and asking her companion to show him “where Edwards touched you.”

Results of the filmed interaction will eventually make their way to www.paulmecurio.com.

The t-shirt, by the way, reads: “Edwards ‘08 Don’t Be a Player Hater.”

After a long morning of credential-gathering and logistical planning (aka wandering around downtown Denver looking for a place to park that cost anything less than the car), it was an air-conditioned relief to step into Denver’s Hard Rock Cafe and catch the tail end of a speech by former Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson. Good Time Charlie is best known for inspiring the Tom Hanks bomb Charlie Wilson’s War, about the Trinity native’s semi-covert appropriation of hundreds of millions of U.S. defense dollars to support anti-Soviet CIA operations in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Wilson wielded his influence on this Monday morning brunch crowd to speak out against war, specifically the array of entanglements — Iran, Iraq, Georgia, etc. — promised by Republican presidential candidate John McCain, or, as he’s known around Denver this week, John McSame.

Wilson acknowledged the need to take the fight back to Afghanistan — to redirect military attention diverted to Iraq by the Bush administration — and so skirted the whiff of potential irony in his stance against further warmongering, but that’s not to say that the event was entirely irony-free. Not with those ceiling-hung big screens bannering the names of the event’s sponsors — military contractor Lockheed-Martin prominent among them.

To say that former VP Al Gore stole the show from Speaker Nancy Pelosi at this morning’s Netroots Nation convocation would be a lonely understatement in a weekend of hyperbole. Pelosi, despite her bona fides as the first female Speaker of the House and a lot of talk about progressive alliance-making, has failed to deliver on the promise of the Democratic class of 2006. We’re still at war. Karl Rove remains a free man. Etc. None of this may be precisely Pelosi’s fault, and Lord knows she did her best to deflect the blame, but both the tone and content of this morning’s questioning and the pink-clad protesters shouting for Pelosi to “use your power” to bring the troops home made clear that Madame Speaker still engenders significant disappointment, if not outright distrust, among the blogging classes.

Not so Al Gore, who received a rock star’s welcome, and looked the part in a blue blazer over a tie-less black shirt. There would arguably be no Netroots Nation without Gore (as Pelosi pandered), and the assembled lapped that kudo up, though Gore deflected the praise with an obligatory crack about thinking it unwise to claim any credit.

Gore preferred to spend his time in the limelight promoting his call for a 100%-renewable American electrity portfolio in 10 years, and plugging the non-partisan wecansolveit.org as an avenue for change.

Gore’s pitch was inspiring and universal, no way around it, and that made for a sometimes awkward juxtaposition with the Pelosi agenda. For every non-partisan appeal of Gore’s, there was Pelosi to insist that no change is possible without a Democrat in the White House and healthy Democratic margins in Congress. But when a questioner asked Pelosi whether her Congress would accept Gore’s 100%-in-10-years challenge, her long-way-around answer couldn’t quite conceal the fact that she never did say yes.

And that was as good a marker as any of the difference between these two “leaders,” as several questioners addressed them. It was a difference hammered home most interestingly when someone asked Gore the inevitable question about whether he would consider a post in an Obama administration to help further the climate-change agenda.

Without quite ruling that possibility out, Gore made it clear that he feels he’s more useful as a driver of public opinion, influencing the debate by getting the word out, and helping to build a climate of support within which politicians can feel both safe and compelled to create policy.

One can hardly blame him. Gore no longer has to tighten the nuts and bolts of actual lawmaking that so hinder Pelosi. Where she has to take the heat for the complex machinations of Congress, attempting in good grace to face down the disgruntlement of faceless bloggers with out-sized egos and a growing electoral influence to match, Gore can swoop in, engage the room’s inchoate idealism, and go home.

It’s a good gig. And it was a good idea to structure this morning’s Q&A that way, using Gore’s popularity as Pelosi’s escape hatch. And the roomful of bloggers — who do so love to equate commentary with the heavy lifting of actual governance — loved every minute of it.