Now that’s the ticket!

On Wednesday we were advised to be in our seats at the Pepsi Center at 3 PM in order to transact the main business of the Convention: nomination and voting on the Presidential candidate. After the names of Senators Clinton and Obama were placed in nomination, the Secretary of the Democratic National Committee began the alphabetical roll call of the states.

As the roll call progressed, a downside of our life inside the Convention Hall bubble became clear:while people at home could see a running total of votes for the two nominees scrolling across the bottom of their TV screens, we in the hall were in the dark unless we kept score as the states announced their votes. But then Senator Obama’s home state of Illinois in front of us passed and we progressed down to New Mexico; New Mexico yielded to Illinois, and its Delegation Chair, Mayor Daley, in turn yielded to New York.

It was Senator Clinton herself who made the motion to suspend the roll call and nominate Senator Obama by acclamation. And so, at 4:45 PM, we had ourselves a nominee. This was the moment in the Virginia Delegation, as captured on the front page of Thursday’s New York Times print edition.

(The guy in the lower right of the picture isn’t doing his FDR impression: he’s scanning around the upper galleries of the Convention Hall with his video camera.)

The next major event was former President Clinton’s speech. As was the case with Senator Clinton the day before, he was absolutely unsparing in his support for his wife’s former adversary. (Just as the President’s speech concluded, I got a text message from an Obama partisan who had fought the Clinton campaign for nearly two years. It read, “I like the Clintons again.”)

The line I liked best from Senator Biden’s acceptance speech was when he related some advice he had received from his mother when he was growing up in Scranton, PA: “When I got knocked down by guys bigger than me – and this is the God’s truth – she sent me back out and said, ‘Bloody their nose,’ so you can walk down the street the next day. And that’s what I did.” Sounds to me like a message to Karl Rove.

Video clips to follow — along with 75,000 of my closest friends, I have to get on the road to Invesco Field.