Denver diarist
Posted: Monday, August 25, 2008 6:20 PM by Daily Nightly Editor
Filed Under:
Brian Williams
By Brian Williams, Anchor and managing editor
NAMING RIGHTS...OR WRONGS?
In recent years, American cities strapped for cash have been auctioning off the naming rights to "civic" auditoriums and arenas.
Everyone can name an example, from the Staples Center to...the Pepsi Center. While these venues used to carry whatever name the various municipalities assigned them (Yankee Stadium, Madison Square Garden, Dodger Stadium, Three Rivers, etc.), these days they amount to massive advertisements.
Thus, at the Democratic National Convention for the next three nights, you'll hear countless on-air types saying, "Welcome back to the Pepsi Center in Denver..." which in advertising value -- through sheer, mind-numbing repetition -- will far exceed whatever Pepsi paid the City of Denver (or the local governing authority) to slap its name on the place.
That's just tonight through Wednesday...when we move to Invesco Field. Because journalists generally try to avoid product endorsements (even though covering the "Panasonic" or "Sony" label on our studio monitors with black electrical tape often angers the manufacturers), the Pepsi Center/Invesco Field issue is something a lot of folks are grappling with this week. I'll add just as quickly that there's an easy fix: "and we're back, from the Democratic National Convention in Denver..."
NEW DETAILS
With first word on Friday night that a Secret Service detail was en route to Joe Biden's Wilmington, Delaware home, so began a modern-day rite of political passage known to a select few people at the very highest levels of American politics: meet the total strangers who will witness and overhear the most intimate moments of your life for the next ten weeks, and perhaps for the next four years -- and if you're really lucky, for the rest of your life.
The Secret Service exercises great care when selecting the agents for their particular protectees. At USSS headquarters in Washington a few years back, I was once shown a graphic depiction of the known locations of all of their domestic protectees. While I was asked not to share specifics of what I saw, the icons in Austin, Texas (Lady Bird Johnson) and Bel Air (Nancy Reagan) weren't hard to figure out.
Others, in other places, were tougher to crack. All of their various details (three shifts a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year) are chosen with care. I recently visited Mrs. Reagan in California and was struck by how personal her relationship is with her agents, and how gentle they were with her. I remember feeling the same way about the outstanding collection of agents assigned for many years to Mrs. Johnson.
Joe Biden's detail will be vastly different in almost every measurable way. They will take on the logistics and protection of a vice presidential candidate at the height of the fall campaign, and all that entails.
Barack Obama once told me that he fiercely resisted giving up his privacy for the first few weeks of his protection. When he called home, to talk to his wife and daughters, he insisted on being alone -- away from the vehicle, outside of the holding room packed with agents. He quickly realized, however, that these men and women who are willing to take a bullet in the chest to protect his life will also respect and protect his private life.
These days on the campaign trail, Senator Obama spends much of his idle time (often while waiting to be introduced to give a speech) talking with his agents, in what has clearly developed into a mutual friendship. The Obamas invited members of their detail into their Chicago home to celebrate Christmas with their family.
President Bush, like his father before him, has grown close to many of his agents...a fact of life for all modern-era First Families. John McCain resisted formal protection until deep into the campaign (preferring private security guards instead) and according to press accounts, only gave in after the Secret Service agreed to a "modified" protection plan. If Senator McCain prevails in this campaign, that plan will presumably have to be "modified" once again.
