DENVER—Sharon Stewart couldn’t believe her good fortune—two tickets to Sen. Barack Obama’s historic night in Denver for $15 apiece.
She bought them on Ticketmaster for the “American Presidential Experience” at Invesco Field at Mile High and invited a friend to join her as Obama accepts the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.
But it turns out her tickets weren’t for Obama’s presidential experience but for a traveling museum of White House memorabilia. And the tickets are no good anyway because the museum won’t be open to the general public Aug. 28, the day the Democratic National Convention moves to Invesco Field for Obama’s acceptance speech.
“I’m just devastated,” said Stewart, who splits her time between Phoenix and Los Angeles.
Add the American Presidential Experience to the list of things thrown into flux by Obama’s decision to move the last night of the convention from the Pepsi Center to Invesco Field, where as many as 80,000 people could be on hand for his speech.
The question of how tens of thousands of tickets will be handed out to the public has been a source of speculation since Obama’s campaign announced the move to Invesco on July 7. One logistical problem for campaign staffers has been coming up with a system that would allow them to stop people from selling tickets on eBay—and ensuring that Obama faces a friendly, and full, house.
The Democratic National Convention Committee will soon announce how tickets will be distributed.
The American Presidential Experience opens in an Invesco Field parking lot Aug. 22—three days before the convention.
Billed as the nation’s largest traveling exhibit of presidential memorabilia, it includes a re-creation of Air Force One from the early 1960s, copies of inauguration gowns worn by nine first ladies, and a replica of the Oval Office.
After Stewart got an e-mail from a friend telling her she could buy tickets to Obama’s big night, she went to her computer and picked up two of them.
She told friends and they did the same thing. Then she found out the tickets were not only no good for Obama’s speech, they wouldn’t even get her into the presidential museum that day.
She plans to ask Ticketmaster for her money back.
In response to e-mail inquiries by the Rocky Mountain News about the confusion, Ticketmaster said that customers were notified that tickets will not be sold to the exhibit for Aug. 28 and a mass credit is being issued.
However, Ticketmaster said it does not disclose any information about how many tickets were sold for the event and how many are available.
“Ticketmaster customer service has not received any complaints,” Amanda Mill, a Ticketmaster spokeswoman in Los Angeles, wrote in an e-mail. “Ticketmaster was only selling tickets to the American Presidential Experience.”
James Warlick, executive producer of the American Presidential Experience, said the Secret Service had informed the curators on Tuesday that the exhibit would be inside the security perimeter that the agents had established for people who would have tickets for the Obama speech.
The exhibit’s organizers then notified Ticketmaster that the tickets for the Aug. 28 exhibit were not available for purchase.
“We apologize for this unfortunate situation and hope to work with people who bought tickets to the Experience thinking they were for the Obama event,” Warlick said in a statement. “As it developed though, we had no control over the change in days the tickets to the American Presidential Experience were available.”
Stewart, however, is still hoping to score tickets for Obama’s speech.
“It’s historic,” she said. “I have got to be there. I am just trying to figure some way to get into the convention.”
In addition to documents signed by every president while in office, the exhibit will include:
— Shoes of several presidents
— A suffragette exhibit
— A full-size replica of the Oval Office
— A presidential limousine
— A full-size mock-up of a section of fuselage from Air Force One
— Replicas of chairs used by Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy and Franklin D. Roosevelt
— A 20-foot high replica of the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C.
— A Florida voting machine from the 2000 election
