The 2008 DNC placed Denver center stage in national politics

There were many great moments for Denver during the 2008 Democratic National Convention, which four years ago filled this city with hope and lots of spare change. But for many of us, none was as deeply satisfying as finally plopping our collective asses into the plastic seats of what was then Invesco Field at Mile High, where Barack Obama would soon accept the Democratic presidential nomination. And it wasn't just because the first African-American candidate to be nominated by a major party for the office of president would give his acceptance speech on August 28, 2008 — exactly 45 years to the day after Martin Luther King Jr. made his "I Have a Dream" speech. Or because those who were waiting to hear that speech had somehow managed to snag tickets, then survived an insane two-mile, hours-long line in the August heat that wound past a former meth lab before it reached the stadium. No, what made that moment truly great was the realization that, after almost two years of planning, Denver had made it through the gauntlet of security checkpoints, the clogged roadways and the throngs of protesters, and emerged as something new.

Win McNamee

Barack Obama accepts the nomination.

Susan Sarandon showed her support in Denver in 2008.

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More About

• Barack Obama
• John Hickenlooper
• Steve Farber
• Politics
• Local Politics

As Obama stepped onto the stage, the world finally saw the Mile High City we all hoped we'd see one day.

"It was the most intense experience of my life," John Hickenlooper says of the DNC. Hickenlooper, who was mayor of Denver when the convention came to town and is now the governor of Colorado, has weathered a lot of intense experiences. But in the summer of 2008, almost every day was another challenge — and another opportunity. One of the biggest of both was the eleventh-hour decision by the Obama campaign to move that acceptance speech on the final night of the convention from the Pepsi Center, where it had long been planned, to the football stadium, which would let at least five times as many people catch the historic event. The new setting came with its own irony, as well as more than a few obstacles: When the metropolitan district that built the stadium decided to sell the naming rights, Hickenlooper, then best known as a founding partner/owner of the Wynkoop Brewing Co., Colorado's first brewpub that happened to be conveniently across the street from Westword's last office, campaigned from behind his bar to keep the Mile High Stadium name — or at least part of it. That push led many people to suggest he consider a career in politics — and he did more than consider it. Three years later, he ran a savvy, come-from-behind campaign to become mayor of Denver; in 2010, he moved across the street to an office in the Capitol.

But when Obama decided he wanted to deliver a Mile High speech in August 2008, Hickenlooper's team had just a few weeks to come up with new plans for crowd control, security and weatherproofing (or not) at the new stadium. Then there was the matter of tickets: People who'd given up on catching the speech were suddenly clamoring for seats. At one point, former secretary of state Madeleine Albright contacted the mayor's office, looking for tickets. The convention planners had already worked on putting VIPs in appropriate skyboxes, but Hickenlooper now realized that he not only didn't have tickets for Albright and the rest of the diplomatic corps, he didn't have tickets for state lawmakers or the metro mayors he'd been working with on regional cooperation issues — including cooperating on getting the convention to Denver. And there were simply no more tickets available. Reading the stadium contract, he saw that the Broncos organization was guaranteed a certain number of seats for an event at the football field — so he called Joe Ellis, president of the team, and asked if he had any tickets to spare. Sure, the exec told the mayor, what did he need? Twenty-five? Fifty?

Several thousand, Hickenlooper replied. And Ellis came to the rescue. Soon a mayoral aide was stuffing a valise full of tickets to Obama's nomination speech, and distributing them became almost a full-time job.

That Hickenlooper had become mayor of Denver was almost as unlikely a success story as Denver itself winning the convention. Almost.

"As a city, we'd been looking at it for a while," says Elbra Wedgeworth, the self-proclaimed "east-side girl" who was president of Denver City Council when she decided the time was right for Denver to make a bid, since the city finally had the hotels and facilities the convention would require. "By 2006, I thought maybe we could do it," she remembers. "Everyone thought I was crazy, but I just knew it was the right thing to do. It would put Denver on the world stage politically." And she started finding believers. She went to see Steve Farber, the very connected lawyer who'd been appointed to an earlier convention site-selection committee by Bill Clinton; and then to Richard Scharf, head of the convention and visitors' bureau now known as Visit Denver; and on to Hickenlooper. And in January 2007, they started putting together a team of volunteers and pulling together a bid, which ultimately ran to 1,600 pages and fifteen pounds. More than thirty cities initially expressed an interest in the 2008 Democratic convention; Denver had made it to the final three when the Republicans picked Minneapolis, taking that out of the running. New York was still in the mix, but "Bloomberg basically let Denver push it," Wedgeworth remembers. "We wanted it more than anybody else."