The meeting was supposed to be just for delegates, but they ended up not even checking. I couldn’t believe how many people were there. It was this big convention hall completely packed full of people standing. When she finally got in, she said, “if I knew I had this many delegates, well…” (It was a joke.) In case you thought the the PUMA's were just an invention of the right wing media to make it look like Democrats don't back Obama, I can attest that they are real, we saw them there. They talked throughout the meeting, and one thing I overheard is that she didn't really mean any of the things she was saying, that she was forced to say them. I don't know about them, but the woman I supported during this campaign would not let anyone force her to do anything she didn't want to do. They left the room chanting McCain. I guess they didn't listen very closely to Hillary's speech on Tuesday.
Anyway, she told us we were released, and told us we should vote how we wanted to vote, but that she had cast her vote for Barack Obama. We had already voted, as has most delegations, I believe, so we weren't sure what would happen - were they going to have us recast our votes?
We got to the Pepsi Center right as the roll call vote began. It is a very cool process, the delegation chair of each state says something about their state and then how the votes are cast. It goes through alphabetically. Ted has the rundown of each state in his live blogging, but I will just tell you where it got interesting. California passed. They have a lot of votes, and David Schapira told me they probably wanted to be the state that put Obama over the top. California went for Clinton in the primary, but oh well. (BTW someone told me Barbara Boxer was really mad that CA passed.) Then Illinois passed, and using the same logic, it would make sense that they wanted to put him over top. Then New Mexico yielded to Illinois. I hadn't been keeping a tally of the votes, but thought that was kind of quick.
Illinois, however yielded to New York. Then I saw all of the secret service and Hillary in the middle of them walking towards New York. The crowd went crazy. Either, New York was going to announce that all of their 282 votes were for Obama and that would put him over the top, or something else. The delegation chair turned it over to Clinton, and she asked for a suspension of the rules and for Obama to be nominated by acclamation.
It was absolutely poetic, and for me as a Clinton delegate, absolutely the best way this could have ended. I think this was really the highlight of the convention for me.
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