DENVER — If you wanted to get near the Illinois delegation yesterday during the historic nomination of their junior senator, Barack Obama, as the Democratic candidate for president, you had to get past an unlikely pair of gatekeepers: Hillary Klug, of Aspen, and actor Kal Penn, of “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle” and “Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay.”
Klug, a 25-year-old University of Denver law student, is the daughter of a prominent Aspen family that includes her father, Warren, who runs the Aspen Square Hotel, and her brother, Chris, a bronze medalist in snowboarding in the 2002 Winter Olympics. She is volunteering as a media relations hand on the floor of the Democratic National Convention — keeping photographers, cameramen and correspondents in check.
Penn, a 31-year-old actor, is best known as part of a dopier tandem, Kumar in the “Harold and Kumar” stoner comedies. But since last October he has been immersed in a more cerebral undertaking — serving as a surrogate to the Obama campaign, talking to young voters about the candidate.
“I grew up in a middle-class home in New Jersey,” Penn said Wednesday on the convention floor. “Seeing people like the ones I grew up with losing their jobs and going to war in Iraq over these last years, I wanted to get involved in the Obama campaign.”
But he has found himself doing more hands-on convention work than celebrity speeches and MTV “Rock the Vote” ads this week.
During the run-up to the convention, the Obama campaign asked Penn to serve as a “political whip.” He accepted. So, all week he has been working the narrow main center aisle of the hall, between the New York and Illinois delegations, clad in a yellow vest and wearing an earpiece through which he hears running chatter from the two offices that choreograph convention floor operations: the convention secretary’s office and “the boiler room.”
Some delegates who have passed Penn have done double-takes, and some have requested a photo with him or an autograph.
“Sometimes Kal is more of a problem than a help,” Klug joked Wednesday night, as the actor-turned-whip posed for a photo with a New York delegate.
Penn is sweating along with a sprawling team of whips — comprised of Obama campaign volunteers, most of whom are ordinary citizens and union workers — to ensure that the convention looks just right on television.
If you’ve ever wondered how it is that the signs in crowd-reaction TV shots always look so well coordinated, it’s because Penn and the whip teams run through the aisles during speeches handing them out. When the call comes in on their earpieces, they start giving out the next coordinated rally sign.
With two minutes remaining in vice-presidential nominee Joe Biden’s speech, they replaced red “Biden” signs with blue “Obama-Biden” signs, which delegates waved en masse when Obama made a surprise appearance onstage at the conclusion of Biden’s speech.
During Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer’s speech, they doled out red signs that read “McCain More of the Same.” They unloaded trash bags full of placards with “Unity” on one side and “Hillary” on the other during Hillary Clinton’s speech Tuesday night.
During yesterday’s roll call, they handed out homemade-looking posterboards with slogans such as “Barack the Vote” written on them in magic marker.
The volunteer whips move up and down the rows distributing signs during the quieter portions of speeches, preparing the crowd for their ecstatic, sign-waving, “Yes We Can”-chanting moments.
When delegates on the floor raise a sign at the wrong time, one of the yellow-vested sign monitors will sometimes motion them to keep it down. Any delegate who really “acts up” might be reprimanded with a call on “the black phone.” Under each of the blue delegation placards on the convention floor is, indeed, a black landline phone — a direct line from the convention secretary’s office and the boiler room to the delegates.
“The black phone has rung more than once at the Washington delegation,” Linda Mitchell, a Washington delegate and fervent Hillary Clinton supporter, said yesterday. “We’ve been, quote, ‘a problem.’ Once they called and singled out one of our delegates, like, ‘The woman in the red — she needs to put that sign down!’”
Some aspects of crowd reactions at the DNC, it seems, are as scripted as the speeches coming from the podium.
The texts of the speeches run in white capital letters against a black screen at the rear of the convention floor. Directives as to how to deliver applause lines differ depending on the politician. (Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid used a “//” mark to indicate pauses in his address, whereas Biden used a red “(PAUSE)” signal; Ted Kennedy had the emphasized lines in his speech rendered in bolder and bigger letters, while Hillary Clinton had hers underlined).
The pace of the scrolling teleprompter is controlled manually, in the so-called boiler room, and can lead to the occasional gaffe. (Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi yesterday got tripped up when the teleprompter scrolled mistakenly into the next speaker’s text. Apropos of nothing, she read, “My fellow Democrats, delegates and friends. Buenos dias,” but nobody seemed to notice.)
Above the teleprompter, a large digital clock ticks down the time limit of a speech. When it reaches zero, it starts counting forward to show the speaker how long over the time limit he or she has gone. President Bill Clinton, for example, went 10 minutes overtime last night, in a speech that was originally slated for nine minutes and change.
andrew@aspendailynews.com
