Badge Envy

Editors note: This is just one in a series of dispatches from the DNC. To read all dispatches – large and small – as they're posted, go here.

If, as John Edwards put it, there are two Americas, during DNC week the dividing line runs between these two Americas: 1) those on The List; and 2) those not on The List. With the rainbow of credentials, gilded invitations, velvet-ropes, VIP zones, and avalanche of parties, the most important commodity in Boston is access, and access defines station.

Badge envy is the basics. At 9:00 a.m., when the daily credentialing ritual begins, the third floor of the Westin Copley Place becomes like a bazaar in Karachi, a darkened place of bartering frenzy fueled by jealousy and resentment. Everyone tries to upgrade credentials, or trade them, or prevent someone else from doing the same. I met a staff writer at the Christian Science Monitor at the media party Saturday night, and when I ran into her again Sunday with a hall pass around my neck, the first thing she said, after the flash of personal recognition, was: “where the hell did you get that?”

“I have my ways,” I said, knowing that, somewhere out there, the guy running the mojo meter, just pushed my rating up a notch.

Stephen Elliott, a novelist who is writing a forthcoming non-fiction book about the campaign, said the same when we met at the Fleet Center. “That’s better than mine!” he complained. “Just when you think you’ve made it, they bite you in the ass.”

“There’s seven rooms in this world,” I said to Stephen. “You’re in the first room. You should be in the second room, but it looks like you’re still in the first.”

“Where are you?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “I guess I’m in the second.”

“Dude, you’re not in the second room!”

“Well, who has the right credential?”

Credential power is governed by the document’s color. Forget purple; “it’s toilet paper,” as Stephen said. Light green isn’t much better, gaining access only to nosebleed seats at level seven and above. Dark green is moving in the right direction, unless it says Honored Guest, because that means you’re honored only enough to get to sit in the same place as the light greens. The dark green credential marked PRESS is the one that enables entry into the media bleachers on either side of the stage, and from there, down to the convention hall floor. But that’s a temporary visit – unless you have the permanent red FLOOR credential, a solid footing that is yet eclipsed by the all powerful, bold blue PODIUM tag, which is like having a letter from the King, rolled and sealed in wax, guaranteeing safe passage in all the lands of Ye Knowne Worlde.

Then there’s the branching tree of add-on access echelons, articulated by the hospitality tags for free food and the whole panoply of glowing VIP amulets available only to machers, famous people, or fundraisers for the DNC. And those with the full juice can be identified from afar by their multitude of superfluous badges, dangling like breastplates from handsome Jacobs lanyards – white canvass and leather with the signature top-stitching.

To step outside the convention hall, is to enter a realm even more Hobbesian. Notions about the very locations of the best parties are traded like rumors in a prison. And once you get there, it’s wise to have initiated two, or preferably three different avenues of communication with the organizers or their friends or their PR firm, because chances are one of those RSVPs, mentions, requests, or favors never made it onto the clipboard in the hands of the doorkeepers.