Imagine Planning A Party For 70,000 Guests

'Boiler Room' Team Manages Everything From Sign Distribution To Podium Schedule

by Brian Friel

Thursday, Aug. 28, 2008


Shelly Loos is the convention floor chief, responsible for keeping signs flowing to the delegates all night at the right times. She takes her cues from Paul Tewes, the man-behind-the-curtain in a place just off the Pepsi Center loading dock that is known as the "boiler room." The boiler room is where the Obama campaign coordinates floor action, from sign distribution to the roll-call order to keeping delegation bigwigs informed of what's ahead.

Tonight, however, the boiler room will be handling its biggest live crowd of the week, the 4,440 delegates and 70,000-plus other supporters gathered at Invesco Field to hear Barack Obama's acceptance speech. A key part of the program will be putting the crowd to work--by calling and texting and e-mailing family and friends -- in a symbolic bid to motivate all of the attendees to actually campaign for Obama from now through November.

"While [Republicans] criticize, we're going to organize," Obama campaign chief David Plouffe told Convention Daily on Wednesday. "We are not a campaign that focuses only on press coverage and television ads. We spend a lot of time on this grassroots focus. We're going to contact a lot of voters tomorrow."

Plouffe said that moving the convention outside recognizes the role that grassroots organizers played in the successful primary season. "It's why we won," he said.

"This is a huge organization-builder for us [at Invesco].... We've got people coming in from all over the country, a lot of the battleground states, a big presence from people in Colorado -- which should not be underestimated -- the value of this convention and the organization around it to help us win Colorado."

All of the delegates will be seated on Invesco's football field tonight, while Colorado residents and other visitors will sit in the stands--"honored guests," as Obama adviser Anita Dunn called them, referring to the name given to attendees who usually occupy the upper-level seats at conventions.

Tewes and Loos will run the delegate area on the field. That will make sign distribution easier on the volunteers but also means that monitoring the overall look of the crowd will be a greater challenge.

The duo are veteran Democratic operatives. Tewes served as Al Gore's Iowa caucus manager and then worked at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee as political director. He ran Obama's widely acclaimed Iowa caucus efforts and then hopped from battleground state to battleground state to keep the campaign on track to the nomination.

Loos has run floor operations at several conventions. Also on hand to help tamp out any political fires will be Steve Hildebrand, Tewes's consulting partner and Obama's deputy national campaign manager.

Watching Loos in action on Tuesday night gave a hint of what's in store at Invesco Field. She rolled a giant green bin up the Pepsi Center's loading dock where it feeds into the convention floor. As the main speaker of the night prepared to hit the stage, Loos had no time to enjoy the cool breeze blowing out from the arena bowl. Instead she swung her arms into the bin and pulled out a garbage bag with a bundle of sign poles sticking out of the top, and handed them to a neon-vested volunteer.

The signs -- bearing "Hillary," "Obama," and "Unity" -- were hustled into the arena and quickly distributed to delegates on the floor and in the stands. Loos pulled bag after bag out of the bin in rapid succession to make sure that the floor was a sea of bouncing signs when Hillary Rodham Clinton's name came over the public-address system.

Richard E. Cohen contributed to this story.

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