Now that my computer is back up and running after getting fried on the road, I’ll share some random thoughts and observations from last week at the Denver Democratic Convention:

The number of "Clintonistas" – ardent Hillary backers refusing to even consider moving over to Barack Obama – didn’t seem to be nearly as large as the wider media reports seemed to suggest. I met a lot of them, quite a few from this area’s delegations, and I’d say the percentage who said they’d never vote for Obama was around the 5% mark. I know I wasn’t conducting a scientific observation, but if their numbers were really THAT large, I think I’d have run across more of them in even the most random sampling.

I was amazed at how many people I talked with were first-timers – folks who’d never been to a Convention or voted before. Again, unscientifically speaking, it was maybe 1/3 of the people I met during the course of the week. (Could there be implications from this that may affect the accuracy of the polls being reported by most outlets? Don’t most polls track "likely voters, i.e. people who have participated in the past?)

A moment before Thursday’s Obama acceptance speech: I literally bumped into a fellow who was setting up his private camera where we were setting up ours. I asked him where he was from and he told me, "Tifton, Georgia. I was sitting at home watching Michelle’s (Obama) speech on Monday night, and I just said to myself, ‘I have GOT to get there!’".

The number of celebrities you could just bump into in the hall (or at the bar) was impressive – Charles Barkley, Louis Gossett, Jr., Sheryl Lee Ralph, Wendell Pierce (The Wire), Kevin Johnson (NBA), Spike Lee, Jamie Foxx, Rosie Grier, Franco Harris… and that was just one afternoon! Amazingly, they pretty much said nearly the exact same thing, "This is History, and I just had to be here…"

There was no way to keep count of the African-American men and women who came up to me and whispered in my ear, "It’s a great day to be a Black man, isn’t it?". Some were delegates, some were just visiting, some were members of Congress. Even more striking were the Whites who said much the same thing to me.

Want to shut down the media in total? Just wipe out the Blackberry system. It was shocking (and not necessarily in a good way) to see how much reporters have come to rely upon them as a conduit to the campaign they are supposed to be "reporting" on.