Va. delegates get the royal treatment in Mile High City

DENVER

For the second time this week, I've watched as wheelchair-bound octogenarians were asked to stand up and stagger through metal detectors at the Norfolk airport and then - when the pins in their hips set off the alarms - each was subjected to a pat-down by humorless TSA agents wearing rubber gloves.

The indignity of it all.

Oddly enough, I felt no safer in the sky after these frail folks were worked over in the name of the war on terrorism. Profiling be damned; the next president has to fix this airport lunacy. It's the least he can do for traveling Americans.

That was the inauspicious start of my long journey to Denver that began in Norfolk on a jet made for munchkins, passed through Houston and arrived in the Mile High City - about eight hours after I left home.

Once off the cramped aircraft, I realized why it was that, a long time ago, a guy named Henry John Deutschendorf changed his name to John Denver in honor of his favorite city.

Cool, clean mountain air, zero humidity and something the Rocky Mountain-loving singer didn't live long enough to see: wall-to-wall smiling Obama supporters.

In fact, everyone in Denver seems to have taken their happy pills. For now, anyway. No telling what kind of mood the Hillary folks will be in by nomination night.

Friendly convention volunteers lined the route from the baggage claim to the airport parking lots Saturday night, cheerfully pointing delegates toward taxis and shuttle buses. My shuttle mates were so exquisitely diverse they could have come from Central Casting: two young white males, an older Asian man, a middle-aged African American woman and a white woman wearing an hijab.

Big tent time.

The luggage loader who tossed my suitcase onto the bus swore that Denver never looked better.

"They've really spruced up the city just for you!" she gushed.

As if on cue, as we hit the edge of downtown, a fireworks display exploded in the velvet sky. Apparently it was the climax of a media raver at a Denver theme park. Some of us missed it and all the Coors beer that went with it.

The 100 or so members of the Virginia delegation, their families - and the media dogging them - are staying at the downtown Crowne Plaza hotel. No surprise, then, that delegates and assorted Democrats drifted in for breakfast in the hotel lobby restaurant Sunday morning.

Chesapeake Del. Lionell Spruill Sr. was among them. Like many of the sea-level crowd, he said he'd been suffering from headaches since his arrival. Drink lots of water, he advised the journalists who were similarly afflicted.

Politicians being friendly to the press. There must be something in the air. (Not really. Spruill has a reputation as a nice guy.)

Delegates from the Old Dominion have an extra reason to smile. In years past, they say they shared convention space with states such as Georgia and Utah in the nose-bleed section reserved for hopelessly red states.

This year, with Virginia allegedly in play for the Democrats, the delegation has been told it is stationed front and center on the convention floor. Near Illinois.

That means lots of face time on TV.

"All the battleground states are right up front," said Susan Rowland, an aide to Spruill and a delegate in her own right.

An ebullient, grinning Gov. Timothy M. Kaine seemed to be everywhere, with his family in tow. Early Sunday afternoon, they dashed out of the hotel, headed for a little mountain biking.

That was the time to do it. The business of the Democratic National Convention commences today.

Kerry Dougherty, (757) 446-2306, kerry.dougherty@cox.net