In an August 15 blog about my wife being rejected for Barack Obama acceptance-speech tickets despite having registered for them within fifteen minutes of former Denver mayor Federico Peña announcing, "It's first come, first served," I promised to eat some of my accusatory words if more positive e-mails arrived in my in-box or that of my twin daughters, whose names we registered under at a website that predated one launched on August 6. Well, my diet won't be supplemented by any nouns or verbs today. All I have to report on is more broken promises.
Immediately after the August 6 press conference detailed in this blog, my wife registered under my e-mail address as well as her own -- and while she received the rejection note reproduced in the first linked item above, I have yet to get any communique from the Democratic National Convention Committee even though DNCC chieftain Leah Daughtry pledged that everyone who signed up would be contacted one way or the other. And my daughters wound up with bupkus, too.
I have yet to stumble across any news report about the initial ticket site since its successor went live. According to a Channel 4 package by reporter Jodi Brooks, at least 24,000 people signed up at the initial address, including us. So what happened to that list? Were those people first in line? Or did their applications simply go away, superceded by a newer roster? At this point, questions about that and anything else untoward have been swept away by upbeat coverage of this past weekend's ticket hand-out. Nevertheless, the whole fiasco has caused bad feelings or confusion among quite a few folks -- even one person who eventually wound up with a ticket. Here's a comment that individual posted on the first Obama ticket blog:
I volunteered for 7 hours of door-knocking in a very rough area of Aurora and got the "denied and waitlisted" letter. I wrote a letter voicing my feelings of being cheated to the entire Aurora field office and copied the colorado obama email address as well as any other ones i could find related to his campaign. I felt like I was probably always waitlisted, and that my time & manpower was used simply to get troops on the ground.BUT, I got two calls in about an hour from the field office telling me there was a glitch in the system and that my name had been missed and that they were doing what they could to accommodate me. Late last night, I got a call telling me I received one ticket, but not two. I'm fine with that, but I do wonder if it was all the complaining I did or my "All Star" credentials that got me in there. My mom worked 14 hours and got into a nose-bleed section. So we'll both be there, just by ourselves on opposite sides of the stadium. Hmmmm. I do wonder who was in charge at the Colorado campaign who decided to do things this way, and I hope they learned some valuable lessons about how to communicate to the masses.
Of course, Daughtry had emphasized that people didn't have to volunteer (or donate) to get tickets. But there's plenty of anecdotal evidence suggesting otherwise -- some of which strikes mighty close to home for yours truly. -- Michael Roberts
