DENVER—The real action at the Democratic National Convention isn’t on the floor of the Pepsi Center but on the streets of downtown Denver.
From protesters to peddlers, walkers to gawkers checking out both the serious and the silly, it’s all here this week, starting at the 16th Street Mall, a pedestrian tourist trap that’s usually filled with families on the weekends, businessmen and women during the day, and the young and the restless at night.
On Tuesday, “Iraq Veterans Against the War” puzzled some onlookers by staging what is best described as guerrilla street theater along the pedestrian walkway and other side streets.
Dressed in desert fatigues and pointing their empty hands like kids playing cops and robbers, dozens of former military men and women participated in “Operation First Casualty,” winding their way through the streets staging a siege of the urban area as though they were back in Baghdad, complete with civilian “casualties” and soldiers getting shot.
“I would rather sit in jail 100 years than bring harm to one civilian in Iraq through an illegal war that is a gross misuse of American might,” said Sgt. Matthis Chiroux, a former Army photojournalist who said he had just learned he wouldn’t be prosecuted for refusing orders to deploy to Iraq this summer after the Army ordered his return to active duty.
Not far away, giggling teenagers were having their pictures taken with police dressed in riot gear like tourists posing with the guards at Buckingham Palace.
Every so often, a group of police would come by on horseback or bicycle. The horses had clear plastic visors over their eyes just like the officers to protect them from objects or chemical irritants like the pepper spray that was used on a group of protesters the night before.
The bicycling officers got to wear shorts in the stifling heat, but they were still sweating like the Olympic road racers in Beijing.
Several streets closed for the DNC were filled with bicyclists or walkers, orange cones and barricades rerouting traffic, and red covers wrapping parking meters.
The traffic flowed up and down the pedestrian mall toward the convention center at one end and Union Station at the other, where House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s speech on energy policy was occasionally drowned out by a group of Republicans from the University of Utah decked out in “Nobama” T-shirts and holding “Drill Now” signs and bumper stickers that read “Obama for Rock Star, McCain for President.”
“We just want to be here to show people that Colorado is a battleground state and just because they have the DNC here, it’s not a free pass for the Democrats,” said Mark Streeter, 24, a supporter of John McCain.
A block away at the Tattered Cover bookstore, sales of Barack Obama books and memorabilia were brisk. So were sales of irreverent mints packaged in tiny tins that read “National Embarrassmints” with a picture of President Bush holding a bag of money in one hand and a Bible in the other. On the back, it said, “fight errorism, boot Bush.”
There were also the “Indictmints” with Vice President Cheney, Karl Rove, Tom Delay and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby on the front in pinstripe jail outfits and “Eat them with conviction!” on the back. And of course, the “Impeachmints,” peach-flavored mints with an image of Bush leaving the White House, where a sign in the front lawn reads “Worst President Ever.”
At a drugstore on the mall, mints to “Liberate Your Breath” and “Peppermints we can believe in” with an image of Democratic nominee-in-waiting Obama were moving fast.
The men’s clothing store Players offered “liberal” markdowns of 50 to 70 percent on summer shirts.
A few blocks up the 16th Street Mall, Dan Moriarity, a preacher and adjunct Bible professor at Colorado Christian University, was a one-man protest holding up a yellow “Jesus Saves” sign.
“I’m going to be your anti-theme,” said Jessica Sideways, who was decked out in a lady’s hat with a veil and a sign that read, “I am an atheist, lesbian, male-to-female transsexual, and I embrace it all.”
Sideways pulled out her Colorado drivers’ license to prove that was really her last name, which she said she had legally changed last year after leaving a Bible college in Canada, where she had been studying to become a youth minister.
“I had a history professor who had a quote in his classroom: ‘Stand up for what you believe in even if you stand alone,'” said Sideways, who was doing just that until she found Moriarity to stand next to.
If the college Republicans felt like they were behind enemy lines, imagine how Shane Frank of Denver felt. He was handing out pamphlets urging the Democrats and Republics to open the debates to Ralph Nader and others.
Plenty of Democrats told him they still blame Nader for Al Gore’s loss to George W. Bush in 2000.
“I tell them the same can be said for Ross Perot helping Bill Clinton win in ’92,” countered Frank.
And he said he wasn’t necessarily going to vote for Nader, he just wanted more choices: “I’m supporting Democracy, not any particular candidate.”
At the trinket and T-shirt stands outside the convention center, merchants were pushing two new “Obama-Biden” buttons that had arrived about 30 minutes earlier.
One of the best-selling buttons was a limited “Obamanator,” touting a special lager being brewed at the nearby Wyncoop Brewery during the Democratic National Convention.
Several buttons featured an image of Obama with Martin Luther King Jr.
There were blue Obama foam fingers like the ones seen at football and baseball games, only these had two fingers held up in the peace sign.
Inside the convention center at the Official Democratic National Convention Store were two items that McCain backers could surely get behind: the “Yes We Can” flip-flips for $20 and the DNC yo-yos.
Stephanie Moss of Denver was selling “Rolobama” portable campaign banners that roll out to reveal “Obama” on one side and “Yes We Can” on the other.
Not that she was encouraging civil disobedience, but a selling point was that the banners were small and made of plastic, and could easily get past metal detectors at the Pepsi Center, where no outside signs are permitted.
Dan Graeve, 26, of Denver, had the best sign: “Juggling for Change,” but decided to ditch his coin bucket and raise awareness, rather than cash, for global warming.
“I was going to give the money to carbon offsets, and that just got confusing,” he said.
John Stames had a button that read, “Ask me how many homes I have,” a play on McCain’s recent comment that he was unsure exactly how many houses he and his heiress wife owned.
But when posed the question, Stames retorted: “Now, what kind of question is that? I don’t care how many homes the man owns. Ask him something I care about, like how many soldiers are in Iraq? How much money are we spending over there?”
Stames was peddling Hillary Rodham Clinton pens—”Laugh with/at Hillary!” touted the pitch—although he acknowledged he wasn’t selling many of them.
He had hoped that Clinton would beat Obama in the primaries, or at least be tabbed as his running mate.
“That would have been perfect because then I could say she’s getting the last laugh,” said Stames, who didn’t hedge his bets with Obama pens because “everybody’s selling Obama stuff.”
Exactly. It’s selling. Lots of it.
A few blocks away, a young man was spreading his own message with a giveaway that was quite popular.
“Keep America Safe,” he said as he handed out free condoms.
