REPORT FROM ABROAD

The Americas

Denver's 'Potemkin village of democracy'

Last Updated: Friday, August 29, 2008 | 12:27 PM ET

By Neil Macdonald, CBC News

Clutching his big idea, Art Suarez tramps the streets surrounding the zone in downtown Denver that, for the moment, is forbidden to lumpen ordinaries like him.

Art Suarez takes to the streets of Denver, trying to generate interest in his online book about Barack Obama. (CBC)

He's nothing on the pyramid of the Democratic establishment. He no more qualifies for a set of precious convention credentials than the hucksters hawking buttons outside the gates.

But he's a true Barack Obama believer, and what he sees here disgusts him.

Suarez, 49, drove here from Wisconsin on the weekend "with $120 on my debit card." He's sleeping on couches offered to him by people he meets.

Here's his big idea: He's collected the quotes of Barack Obama, organized them according to issue, and created an internet "coffee-table book" — ObamaWisdomBook.com — that anyone can download for free.

He thinks his countrymen and women need to read Obama unvarnished and unspun. He says Obama should realize the highly-produced, television-friendly, super-exclusive goings-on inside the heavily-guarded perimeter of Denver's Pepsi Center "is suffocating his message.

"It is undermining the insurgent appeal that originally drove his campaign."

Suffocating seems an understatement

In a sense, of course, that was inevitable. Successful insurgencies are by definition no longer insurgent. Obama and the Democrats want to appeal to the masses, and packaging in the television age is everything.

But Art Suarez does have a point.

What's going on inside the convention is so finely choreographed, so rigidly controlled and so non-inclusive that suffocating seems an understatement. It certainly seems at odds with the populist designs of the Obama campaign.

Every word spoken at the main podium is parsed by Obama's team. Going off message is discouraged. Every single speaker praises Obama, and all movement is determined by special cards hanging from privileged necks on lanyards.

The rhetoric is for the most part gauzy references to the wonder of change, and the badness of the status quo, and the wrongheadedness inside the Washington Beltway. This from people whose very livelihood depends on a seamless continuation of the status quo, but with them in the seats of power.

And yet, it works. I've covered a lot of political conventions, and I have never been able to understand what possesses otherwise intelligent, sober citizens to shriek and stomp and shake with emotion during rote stump speeches. But they do.

Gitmo on the Platte

Outside the Pepsi Center, the controlling grip never relaxes.

Protesters effectively require permission, and the security agencies would clearly prefer them all banned from Denver for the duration.

Just for the occasion, they created a large, makeshift detention centre downtown. The cells are cages constructed of chainlink fencing, topped with barbed wire. Locals refer to it as Gitmo on the Platte.

When on Sunday a larger-than-expected group of protesters showed up at the approved place at the approved time, the U.S. Secret Service responded by locking down the whole convention. No one got in, no one got out until the protests petered out and dissipated.

"They could rush the gate all at once," one uniformed agent told me. "They do that, you know."

When I pointed out they were a pretty meek bunch, that some of them were old ladies and children, and that most were liberals picketing a liberal convention, he shrugged: "A decision was made."

Ah. This at a convention being held to nominate a former community organizer from Chicago's South Side.

Security forces were omnipresent during the Democratic convention in Denver. (CBC)

Inside the perimeter, thousands of SWAT-style police travel in squads on wrought-iron running boards installed on big, menacing, blacked-out SUVs. They're from different agencies, but all wear the same black uniform, decked out with heavy firepower and long, menacing clubs.

Most are pleasant enough if approached, but they tolerate no exceptions to their many rules — which you often only discover once you've broken one — or challenges to their authority.

On Tuesday, a member of the left-leaning women's protest group Code Pink reportedly demanded to know why a man was being arrested in a downtown park.

"Back it up, bitch," an officer told her, before whacking her with his baton . She was later dragged off to Gitmo on the Platte for processing. Embarrassingly, it was recorded, and posted for public consumption on the internet.

• Watch video (Warning: Contains graphic language.)

The "event staff" controlling the convention's points of entry aren't about to debate their instructions, either.

Feeding the media

Attendees — and remember, anyone attending this convention is thoroughly vetted far in advance — are forbidden from entering with any sort of fresh fruit. A journalist or a delegate might get rebellious and peg one at a speaker, apparently. As journalists surrendered their juicy contraband the first morning, the potentially dangerous tangerines, plums and pears filled the waste barrels.

Liquids are regarded with suspicion. Some are forbidden. One of my on-air CBC colleagues, a dignified 71-year-old commentator, was relieved of his hairspray.

I haven't met a single journalist who doesn't complain about the manufactured nature of the whole event. "A Potemkin village of democracy," one columnist called it.

Yet they — we — accept this all meekly, recording and reporting speeches we would ignore in most other settings.

Good media strategists understand that reporters, once inside a controlled environment, have to work with whatever they are fed.

In here, every speech is relative only to every other speech. Hence, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann practically swooning after Hillary Clinton's nicely delivered, but hardly historical speech Tuesday night: "A grand slam!" sputtered the ecstatic newsman. "Out of the park! Over the fence! Over the buildings beyond the fence!"

In my own defence, I prefer listening to people like Art Suarez. I really do. But it's hard to get outside the perimeter very often.