Dolan said there were no felony arrests and just two gross misdemeanor arrests. “The bottom line with those individuals is that they wanted to be arrested,” he claimed. “I haven’t gotten any complaints about how they were arrested. it was basically uneventful for us.” He characterized the concert-goers as generally well-behaved. “They were rambunctious, but they were not damaging property,” he said. “They were not assaulting anybody. It was basically a big event.”

St. Paul Police Chief John Harrington stated that there were no major security problems in St. Paul on the third day of the convention. “Wednesday was a great day in St. Paul,” he said. “In balance it was a day that really was marked with lack of any major crisis or any major issues in the City of St. Paul at all.”

Harrington also spoke about the use of tear gas and other chemical irritants during the first two days of the convention. Some activists have questioned whether police are providing adequate warning before deploying such tools. “Our policy, and the policy we worked out uniformly with all of the agencies, is that we will announce,” he said. “We will give people an opportunity and direction as to how they can leave the area. … We will then make another announcement typically to say that we are now about to deploy gas, and then gas is deployed.”

There are exceptions to this policy, Harrington noted, when an officer or citizen is being attacked. “Our training generally is that we give verbal commands as we are using force,” he said. “So it would be atypical to have that not happen.”

Harrington also stated that 283 people have been booked into the Ramsey County Jail so far, including 120 on felony arrests, primarily for criminal damage to property and rioting charges. An additional nine RNC-related arrests were made in Minneapolis overnight.

Harrington characterized as a failure the attempts to thwart the RNC from proceeding. “They came here to try and stop the convention, to crash the gates, to stop the buses,” he said. “They failed. They made numerous attempts to crash the gates and never got in.”

When the press conference was opened to questions, Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman questioned the rough treatment of some reporters by police. She and two of her producers, along with an Associated Press photographer, were arrested yesterday. Harrington said he couldn’t comment on the specific situation but defended cops interactions with reporters generally. “If they are in the midst of a riot, we can’t protect them,” he said. “It will be very difficult for us in a moment of that kind of chaos to make those kinds of fine distinctions.”

“We meet at one of those defining moments — a moment when our nation is at war, our economy is in turmoil and the American promise has been threatened once more,” Obama told the crowd at the start of his address. “These challenges are not all of government’s making. But the failure to respond is a direct result of a broken politics in Washington and the failed policies of George W. Bush. America, we are better than these last eight years. We are a better country than this.”

Obama delivered plenty of the soaring, inspirational rhetoric that’s made him a figure of worship among millions — while also drawing ridicule from his political opponents. But the son of a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya also laid out a detailed list of policy prescriptions that he would seek to implement if he prevails on November 4. Obama vowed to raise taxes on oil companies, while cutting taxes for 95 percent of American families. He pledged to invest $150 billion in developing renewable energy sources and deliver health insurance for all Americans. The Illinois senator also promised an expedited withdrawal of troops from Iraq, while invigorating military efforts in Afghanistan and the pursuit of Osama bin Laden.

“We are the party of Roosevelt; we are the party of Kennedy,” he said. “So don’t tell me that Democrats won’t defend this country. Don’t tell me that Democrats won’t keep us safe. The Bush-McCain foreign policy has squandered the legacy that generations of Americans — Democrats and Republicans — have built, and we are here to restore that legacy.”

As the stadium slowly filled to capacity throughout the day, the noise level grew to raucous levels. By the time Obama took the stage at 8:12 p.m., there were deafening chants of “Yes, we can” and “Si se puede” spreading across the stadium. Women and men danced deliriously in the aisles. Even the cops were having their pictures taken to memorialize the moment. During Obama’s speech, the crowd responded to even the most banal of sentiments (”We can not meet 21st-century challenges with 20th-century bureaucracy”) with feverish applause.

There were many extraordinary sights on the floor of the stadium: a black woman posing for a picture while carrying a Mississippi placard and grinning like she just discovered an oil well in her backyard; an older white guy with a pronounced southern drawl barking into his cell phone, “It don’t get no better than this, baby!”; an African immigrant in an orange flower-print dress with tears streaming down her cheeks as she watched Obama on the jumbotron; more black folks singing along to “Born in the USA” than has ever previously been witnessed.

When the 45-minute speech was over and the stadium finally started to quiet down — the smell of sulfur filling the air from spent fireworks — I tracked down Hussein Samatar (pictured at right) on the floor with the Minnesota delegation. The Minneapolis resident came to this country from war-torn Somalia when he was 22 years old and now runs the African Development Group of Minnesota. “It is extremely exciting,” said Samatar, who is serving as a delegate for the first time. “I could not ever have imagined in 1991 when the war broke I could be here listening, to be able to be part of history making in the United States of America. That’s what I would want every immigrant, anywhere in the world to feel.”

Dancing to “Born in the USA”

The Rev. Al Sharpton preparing to go on CNN

Waiting for Obama

New York Gov. David Patterson being interviewed on the floor

The Minnesota delegation has Obamamania

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi kicked off the final day of the Democratic National Convention at about 4 p.m. Olympic gymnast Shawn Johnson then led the Pledge of Allegiance and Jennifer Hudson belted out the National Anthem, complete with red fireworks shooting off over the jumbotron. People have been waiting for hours to get through security, but Mile High stadium is now about three quarters full.

Democrats wasted no time in attacking John McCain. “I’m Howard Dean; I’m the chairman of the Democratic National Committee — and I know exactly how many houses I own,” the former Vermont Governor said at the beginning of his address. He then painted the GOP nominee as a lackey for the Bush administration. “John McCain is not a maverick,” he said. “John McCain is a yes man.”

On the floor of the stadium I spoke with Omar Adams, a 36-year-old Brooklyn Center resident who’s attending his first national convention. “Barack Obama motivates people,” he says, surrounded by dancing Minnesota delegates. “It was a phenomenal race beteween him and Hillary Clinton. Hillary stepped down gracefully. Now we have an opportunity to elect someone who’s going to make fundamental sweeping changes across our nation.” Adams has been overwhelmed by the convention. “It was phenomenal,” he says of the first three days at Pepsi Center. “I got there at three o’clock each day, stayed until the very end. You just can’t get enough of it. We’re going to have 75,000 people in this stadium. That tells you people are fed up with what’s going on. People can’t afford the things they want to buy. Wages haven’t gone up, yet gas has doubled. We need to stop fighting the war in Iraq and start paying for things at home.”

I also ran into state Sen. Mee Moua and her husband Yee Chang just outside the floor. They’d just waited two hours to pass through security. “It’s been awesome,” says Chang about the convention. “You see all the people here. They’re from all walks of life, all colors and creeds.” Moua says the family interactions of the Obama and Biden families over the first three days of the convention impressed her. “You don’t stage stuff like that,” she says. “It’s those moments of humanity. Not everything was staged and orchestrated. The tremendous affection that people have for one another, it really showed through.”

An early highlight of day four was the appearance by Rep. John Lewis, speaking on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech. “We’ve come a long way, but we still have a distance to go,” the civil rights leader told the crowd. “We’ve come a long way, but we must march again. On November 4, we must march in every state, in every city, in every village, in every hamlet; we must march to the ballot box. We must march like we have never marched before to elect the next President of the United States Senator Barack Obama.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi starts the proceedings

A surprisingly common sentiment

The view from the fifth level

DNC chair Howard Dean

The Minnesota delegation gets down

St. Paul City Council member Melvin Carter III, with his mother Ramsey County Commissioner Toni Carter

Following a circuitous, 45-minute bus ride — in which our driver inexplicably drove all the way up to the stadium, circled back to downtown Denver and then proceeded anew to the stadium — I am on the ground at Mile High. The setting is indeed spectacular. The stadium is lined with digital signs that read “Obama Biden for the change we need.” The bright blue podium is at midfield, with a backdrop of stone columns and more than a dozen American flags. A little ostentatious, but it’s all about how it plays on the TV, of course. The media horde is impressive. CNN, MSNBC and the other bigwigs have their own tents, while hundreds of other outlets are crammed into an area about 25 yards back from the stage.

There are a few thousand folks already in the house. The Minnesota delegation is seated stage left, near the back of the floor. When I passed by about 30 minutes ago there wasn’t anybody in the section yet. Most delegates will likely be arriving en masse from the hotel shortly. I’m three floors up in the “blogger lounge,” a hideously cramped space that is just off of midfield. Not a bad view. I’m going to head down shortly to interview some Minnesota delegates.

The Minnesota delegation

The media horde

The view from the blogger lounge

I just took the light rail into downtown Denver. People are already heading in droves to Invesco Field at Mile High for this evening’s big event. That means they’ll be sitting in the sun for five hours or more before the festivities get underway. Hopefully there will plenty of water on hand. It’s a beautiful day in Denver. Roughly 70 degrees, with a pleasant breeze. No rain is expected. The conditions should be ideal for the big outdoor event.

At the University of Denver stop, a group of roughly a dozen costumed revelers entered the train chanting “Smoke ganja for Obama,” waving cigarillos in the air and attempting to high-five bewildered passengers. Three stops later they exited delivering similarly themed (although less sonorous) chants: “Smoke weed for Obama” and “Drink for Obama.” They left behind a ceramic pipe on the floor of the train. Presumably this is not a constituency that the Obama campaign has been actively courting.

They’re telling media to arrive at Mile High by 2 p.m. I’ll be hopping a shuttle down there momentarily. More from the stadium this afternoon.

The elusive, but powerful PUMA has become a mythic figure at the Democratic National Convention. By reading the media coverage, you’d think these beasts are prowling every street corner in downtown Denver, threatening to overpower Barack Obama with a cloud of estrogen. But strange thing, these beasts are frustratingly difficult to locate. After three days on the prowl, I finally spotted a half dozen PUMA’s stalking down the 16th Street Mall, surrounded by a pack of journalists and photographers, of course. I couldn’t be bothered to interview any of them, but I did snap some pictures. Look hard, I hear they may be headed for the endangered species list.