Littwin: Denver makes a pitch to be life of the party

By Mike Littwin, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published April 22, 2006 at midnight

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NEW ORLEANS - I didn't think I'd ever say this. But it's hard to enjoy a party these days in New Orleans.

The city of Denver threw one Friday night in a city that knows how to party until it hurts. Right now, everyone here is hurting. Forget what you've seen on TV. That doesn't begin to tell the story. In post-Katrina New Orleans, everything is much worse than you could imagine.

They're having a mayoral election here today, with 20-plus candidates. The race has been a working metaphor for the confusion and dysfunction here. But you don't need a metaphor for the misery. You just need to walk around.

Still, parties must be held (they're holding a French Quarter Festival even as I write this). And Denver threw its party here at the spring meeting of the Democratic National Committee. It was held to try to convince delegates that Denver would be the perfect place to hold the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

Denver did everything right. There was a great band. There was free food. There was free drink. There was a lot of free food. And a lot of free drink.

There were giant photos displayed right out of a Colorado travel brochure. Imagine a concert at Red Rocks, Mayor John Hickenlooper told a cheering crowd, which seemed quite enthusiastic. Of course, it might have been the champagne. It might have been the goodies bag. It might have been the door prize: two free United Airlines tickets, which presumably could be used to fly two people to a Denver convention.

Most people I talked to here have said Denver was a serious contender. Most put the city in the top three, although it was difficult to pin anyone down as to who the other two might be. Maybe Anaheim. Maybe Vegas.

Clearly, though, it's the right time for Denver, which also made a pitch in 2000. "That was a total stretch," said Chris Gates, who was here to make the Denver pitch. "We were telling people how convenient hotel rooms were in Wyoming."

The Mountain West is obviously a potential growth area for Democrats, who apparently need some. If you take out your handy red-blue divide map, you see that Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada are all swing states that swung red last time. It's the same argument Colorado used here to make a pitch to become a caucus state in what may be a new Democratic primary schedule - with another caucus after Iowa and before the New Hampshire primary.

The Democrats are looking for an early state with diversity and potential. And the convention could be looking for someplace with FasTracks and a big airport and a newly remodeled convention center and the Pepsi Center and diversity and potential and, well, nobody has to sell you. You already live in Colorado. And you know you can hold a convention these days and no one has to stay in Wyoming.

I talked to two Democratic committeemen from Massachusetts who said they were just talking about Denver's chances. Everyone, said David O'Brien, "is high on Denver."

He added, "I don't think anyone is putting on a push as strong as Denver is. It has to be one of the front-runners."

Or as Norma Flores, of El Paso, Texas, put it, "What could be wrong with Denver? It has so much going for it."

She might as well have been reading from the brochure, which noted the city's many attributes, including word from Rollerblade.com that Denver is the nation's fifth-best roller-blading city.

"Denver is a hip, young happenin' place," it quoted travel girl magazine as saying. That's a magazine so young and hip I hadn't heard of it.

But Flores also talked about New Orleans and what it meant to be here this week.

"The most important thing was the chance to do public service here. There's so much that has to be done," she said.

Democrats were out in force in New Orleans, which has enough ruined houses for everyone hundreds of times over. And the message was pretty straightforward. You got it from Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean, who was out Friday helping to gut a house in the Lower Ninth Ward - a photo-op waiting to happen.

He said it was too early to think hard about convention sites. But it wasn't too early to get into presidential politics. Dean knows the Republicans went to New York in 2004 to reinforce the message of 9/11.

Bush's approval ratings are down to 33 percent in the latest Fox News poll. Much of the problem for Bush is in Iraq. But much of it stems from the Katrina storm and the president's heck of a job.

If New Orleans could be ready by 2008 for a major convention, and if New Orleans doesn't re-elect Mayor Ray Nagin, who brings up major competence issues of his own, Democrats might not be able to resist New Orleans.

"This is a searing, burning issue," Dean had told the attendant press Friday afternoon, "and I think it's going to cost George Bush his legacy, and it's going to cost the Republicans the House and the Senate and, maybe very well, the presidency in the next election. People will never forget this."

At the party, I asked Dean why this meeting had come to New Orleans.

"We think competence is an enormous issue, and it started here. It became real to America right here. The devastation here is far worse than I thought. If you were out with us today, you saw complete devastation. The idea that it could be going on like this seven months after the hurricane is embarrassing."

If it comes down to a choice between Denver and New Orleans, it would be a choice between competing messages: how to get to the future or how to debate the past.

It isn't just what kind of party you want to be. It's also what kind of party you want to throw.

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