Opening Night

**This post was written on Friday August 22, 2008

So, as soon as I arrived in Denver I could feel the excitement. There were DNC volunteers everywhere! The driver of the shuttle I took, Noah, was telling me about all the people he had met over the past few days coming into to town. Noah, was a pretty cool guy. He has lived in the UIS for three years and grew up in Africa. He was telling me about the perception of the U.S. government where he grew up and how he thinks that will change if Obama is elected. He said that the sentiment was that the U.S. was the parent and their government the children and they came in and told them how to run things, took over their economy and exploited the community for all it was worth. This sounds quite familiar… Latin America, anybody. When Noah dropped me off at University of Denver we exchanged contact information hopefully we’ll keep in touch.

I dropped my things off in my room and quickly met up with Mike Ziri for dinner before the opening events. Around 7:00PM Gov. Howard Dean arrived to open the College Democrats of America National convention. He stressed how important it us for us, the youth, to mobilize and make sure we get all of our friends to the polls. He said that this election belongs to the youth we will make it happen for Obama.

After Dean spoke the Illinois Delegation decided to head back to our residence hall and freshen up to go out the opening social. By the time we got to the venue, a small dinner called Spanky’s that probably should not have had been able to hold 250+ crazy College Democrats it was about 9:30 MT. This was when CNN started to speculate the Biden was the nominee. Everybody had been going crazy all day long about the Obama text message so there were mixed emotions about CNN knowing. At around 10:00PM MT CNN announced that Biden is Obama’s running mate the diner erupted with shouts and cheers.