Just a Moment, Mr. Obama

Any minute now, Barack Obama will pull up at the door of our Erie office in stretch limo with American flags sticking out from the corner, flanked by Secret Service, looking for me. We’ll then walk across the street to the magazine’s “executive boardroom” at Old Town Coffee, grab an Americano and talk about the world.

Yeeeaaaah right.

Still, when I submitted a query a few weeks ago for an interview with the Democrat’s presidential nominee, that dream situation danced in my head for a few days. Knowing that was out of the question, the optimist in me hoped for a few minutes over the phone with the ever-so-popular politician who will make history this month in Denver when he is officially anointed the first black presidential candidate to win a major party nomination.

Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned my restrictive schedule that included a backpacking trip to Olympic National Park.

Oh well.

So all I got from his campaign staff was enough silence to fill Invesco Field during a typical summer afternoon. Assuming, that is, you happen upon the Broncos home field any day but Aug. 27, when Obama will officially accept the Democratic presidential nomination in front of a raucous crowd of nearly 80,000.
Perhaps this publication will be important enough in a few years to bend the ear of a potential president. Funny, I thought the same thing just as the marathon to the White House was beginning.

Hilary Clinton, Mike Huckabee, Christopher Dodd, Ron Paul, John Edwards, Rudy, Barack, McCain, Gravel, Romney, Kucinich, Tancredo, Richardson, Thompson and Biden to name a few. Both sides had too many potential candidates to count by anything but calculator.

The wide-open race was getting heated, and we wanted to be a part of it. It turned out, Joseph Biden, the longtime Delaware senator, was heading to Boulder to speak at the Conference on World Affairs. While a presumptive underdog in the race to the Democratic nomination, we still wanted to chat with him. We figured it’d make for a nice story, not to mention that big names bring more readers. That’s a good thing, my publisher often reminds me.

Biden’s press secretary wouldn’t bite—she didn’t find us a big enough media outlet to set up a one-on-one.
So after being shunned by Barack, consider Yellow Scene Magazine 0 for 2 when trying to track down legitimate contenders for the Oval Office. (Take note, Sen. McCain.) We haven’t given up, and our growth in the past 18 months has opened some doors. The Democratic National Convention doors, for example.

Despite long odds battling with nearly every news organization in the country, we’ve been granted access to the four days of political madness. That means I’ll be setting up a camp next to the Pepsi Center later this month with little more than a cup of coffee, notepad, pencil and laptop. I dream of rubbing shoulders with important politicians and lobbyists, chatting with protesters and penning engaging blogs and stories.
Covering this event is big time for this journalist, even if Yellow Scene Magazine gets little respect on D.C.’s Capitol Hill.

And when I’m sitting in my chair and caffeinating while transcribing my notes, maybe I’ll run across the man of the week, Barack, and corner him into a one-on-one exclusive.

Let’s just hope the Secret Service doesn’t strong arm me first.