Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper knows that the success or failure of the Democratic National Convention could influence how the nation and the world perceive Denver for the next half- century.
So in Tuesday’s State of the City address, the mayor ticked off a few civic initiatives, such as efforts to help juveniles and the elderly, and recounted efforts to boost jobs and tourism. But chiefly — and rightly — Hickenlooper focused on the image the city would present to the world as “Millions of people around the world watch history unfold in the world’s greatest democracy against the backdrop of the Rocky Mountains.”
And he focused on the metropolitan area as a national model for regional cooperation.
Denver hosted its last major political convention in 1908, when Democrats nominated William Jennings Bryan for his third and last hurrah. The convention was used, perhaps prematurely, to tell the world that Denver had outgrown its origin as a “cowtown.”
It remains to be seen what message Denver will send forth this year. As a cautionary tale, we’d note that it took Chicago, once hailed as “the city that works,” decades to recover from the black eye it received in the rioting that accompanied the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
Forty years after that debacle, Hickenlooper is trying to sell the entire metro area as a region that works.
Citing such regional efforts as FasTracks and the careful land-use planning that has accompanied it, the mayor said, “The most powerful changes in America today are taking place not in cities or states, but in metropolitan regions. As I’ve crossed the country these past 18 months raising money for our convention, I am frequently asked how Denver has achieved such success on a regional basis.”
While we agree that the progress wrought by regional cooperation over the past 30 years is impressive, it’s also a rather abstract concept to try to get across on television.
That’s why we applaud Hickenlooper’s efforts to involve Denver residents in the convention and, just as important, to immerse conventioneers in the city by such efforts as the Cinemocracy film exhibition and “America: Live and In Person,” which he described as “a multimedia installation open to the public for online viewing, participation and judging.”
It sounds like quite a show, and the DNC host committee has amassed a healthy stable of volunteers to pull it off. If we can package it all with a security force that avoids the “police riot” that marred Chicago’s image, this convention could truly signal that Denver and Colorado are now players on the world stage.
