By Mike Littwin, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)Published October 27, 2008 at 12:05 a.m.
The crowd that stormed downtown Denver to see Barack Obama was, according to my estimate, quite large. It was, in fact, so large that nobody could decide exactly how large it was.
But whether it was 50,000 people or 75,000 people or as many as 100,000 - the police couldn't seem to settle on just one estimate - the point is pretty much the same:
Obama may or may not turn out to be the transformational figure that, say, Colin Powell foresees, but he definitely finds himself in the midst of a wildly transformational campaign.
We're so used to seeing enormous Obama crowds that it's easy to understate their meaning. A building guard, who couldn't get to the rally because she had to work, was in tears as she watched the sea of Colorado humanity heading to Civic Center. Something, as the songwriter once wrote, is happening here.
And maybe even more telling, Obama drew the crowd almost effortlessly. Ask anyone who's ever run a political campaign how hard it is to get a crowd on the fly. This was just an open-up-the-gates-and-see-what-happens crowd, a two-days-notice crowd, a find-a-place-big-enough-to-hold-'em crowd. Obama gets 100,000 in St. Louis, 75,000 in Kansas City, 30-some thousand in Albuquerque.
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