Denver is a great flat city on a great flat plain. There is no discernible reason for building it here. It was constructed not so much from a spirit of pioneer grit, as are-we-there-yet whining. It was the sight of the Rockies to come that made the railway pause in Denver on the way from Chicago to California.

There are still a worrying number of people here dressed in dungarees and Casey Jones caps, looking like a get-togeth-er of the Waltons Appreciation Society.

Colorado is home to the grey unisex pony-tail, characterful topiaried moustache, unironic cowboy and Indian dressing up – and it’s the state where tie never dyed.

There is no space pressure on Denver. It’s spread like Marmite. Low aspects and expectations, as if it were trying to get away from itself. Cities are not the point of Colorado. The square-edged western state may not have real food or fashion or really much of a sense of humour – but they do have really real weather. They throw thunderous storms. Half of every local news bulletin is devoted to cloud. The weather is God’s great big news. And the meteorologist is the only caster with a qualification.

The delegates arrive in town to a biblical plague of tornadoes. The TV screens are full of a little white house on the prairie lit by a beam of celestial light and behind it is a huge churning threatening black twister. Everybody knows it means something but they can’t quite put their finger on it. For westerners, politics is really the great flat metaphor for the weather.

We’re all here in Denver because Colorado is a marginal. As they put it, a coin-toss state. And the Democrats need it to be heads up, which it’s only done three times since the war. This state encompasses many of the contradictory pressures and problems that toss the Democrats. It’s both rural poor conservative and laid-back hippie liberal. It’s environmentally anxious, keen for alternative power, but also desperate for blue-collar jobs and industry. It’s driven by new ageism and held back by old-time nostalgia. They say it’s the thinnest, or rather least fat, state and has the most cyclists. The girth quotient is increased considerably by the arrival of the Democrats. They wobble and sway in from across the continental United States and beyond, hyperventilating with enthusiasm, endorphins and the thin air of the mile-high city.

Great collections of party faithful are like any other sort of single-issue hobbyist: garden shed weird. These are political Trek-kies, Elvis Clinton fans, and the first thing you notice is that they wear their hearts on their sleeves, chests and buttocks. They are festooned in mission statements and feel-good puns: “Obama is the new black”. Men clatter past swagged in buttons and badges like chain-mail curtains. The streets are beaming bright with a cacophony of competing T-shirts. There is no thought so banal that it can’t be elevated by a breast, or so profound that it can’t be made ridiculous by a beer gut. A chubby gaggle of Mid-western women roll past all wearing XXL that shouts, “Yes we can” – Obama’s message of hope. They look like a collection of ambulant fridge magnets. Yes, we can have fries with that.

The other people who are tipping the scales in Denver are the massive influx of police. This city is getting $50m in federal aid for security and apparently it’s all been spent on porky policemen. You remember the game Bucka-roo, where you had to hang as many things as possible off a mule? Well, Homeland Security plays it with cops. They stand in Continued on page 2 Continued from page 1 sweating black huddles on street corners, bedecked with the accoutrements of containment and aggression, like malevolent Christmas trees. I watch one fat finest settle himself into a fast food bucket seat and get trapped by his security belt.

The convention is being held in the Pepsi Center, home of the local basketball team, the Denver Nuggets, which only I seem to find a sniggeringly stupid name. It holds 20,000 liberal souls and the security is airport exhausting. It seems to both frustrate and galvanise the delegates as they’re pushed and pulled by the gusset-faced bustin’ bobbies. They can see that right here is the dividing line between left and right. It is the aspiration of Democrats to make a land that doesn’t need a metal detector in every public door. What the Republicans want is better iris recognition technology and more arms-out pat-downs and cavity searches without a warrant. I particularly enjoy the security oxymorons who wear flak jackets with Secret Service printed on them in large white letters.

Outside in the beating heat a few special interest groups circle like abandoned pets. Extreme libertarians, or social democrats as we call them in Europe, complain sulkily about freedom of speech, when what they really mean is the failure of anyone to listen. There’s a group of Iraqi veterans who patrol up and down the restaurant and shopping malls using their fingers as guns like nine-year-olds. “This is street theatre,” one of them bellows, just in case.

Trojan is giving away Magnum large con-doms (do you think they were named after a large wooden animal inside which thousands of little men were hiding, ready to jump out and ruin your life?). They come with a pledge card that makes humping sound like a civic duty: “Protecting and respecting ourselves and others.”

There’s a man who wants to tax meat on behalf of global warming and, after dark, the radical religious right emerge like the born-again undead with their hideous posters of mutilated foetuses and their banners condemning gays to the flame. The only time in the whole week I see anyone dead angry, but really angry, are the dozens of middle-aged black women confronted by these vicious divines.

The convention starts slowly. In the inattentive echoing hall Howard Dean (of the inappropriate yell) introduces the first speakers who are, for the most part, well-meaning, awestruck, grateful and instantly forgettable. Single-issue timeservers and survivors are given a grace moment in the spotlight. This convention falls into two halves: prime time and outside prime time. The national television exposure is the point. Why this thing happened. If it’s outside the periphery of the glass eye, then it’s irrelevant.

There are hundreds of makeshift little studios all over the room. They hang like precarious storks’ nests from the tiers of seats. Hundreds of itinerant cameramen prowl the corridors and floor. Dozens of nervous men and small blonde women dab at their amber faces with damp sponges and compacts. You never know whether the chap with the intense eye contact and wires in his ear is secret service squirrel or Fox News. And they’re either going to ask for an opinion or stick a finger up your bottom. There are hundreds of thousands of microphones. Every conventioneer has a camera. Everybody is recording everybody else. They’re all commentators and viewers, participants and audience. The paper press sit hugger-mugger and irrelevant in an allocated gannetry. They spend most of their time reading each other’s political blogs on screen. Next to me, two porky nerdy neocons from The American Spectator have fingers which fly over the keys with a deft familiarity that intimates an adolescence bereft of one-to-one nudity. I can’t help noticing that one of them spends most of his time chatting on Second Life (a name that implies a lack of a primary one). His avatar is seven sizes thinner than he is. It must be said that we political journalists are not an attractive collection. We are train spotters with malice.

The event has a strange, ghostly sense of unreality. You have to keep checking the banks of screens to see what is really happening outside this bubble. The floor fills up with the faithful who gather round banners proclaiming their state. The closer to the podium, and therefore the cameras, the more important are their votes, the tighter the races. Long gone is the time when conventioneers actually had a role in these proceedings. Despite all the trumpeting of democracy, their votes are irrelevant, their presence nothing more than light and movement. They are extras in an expensive telethon. And no longer do they wear celebratory boaters. Now they come in fancy dress. There are dozens of sequined Uncle Sams and homemade Ascot hats that look like elaborate birthday cakes with dioramas on them.

I notice that Georgia has an excess of batty belles all looking like Miss Havisham Goes to the Notting Hill Carnival. But then I suspect Georgia is like that anyway. There are lost men wearing hideous white parkas that turn out to be Alaska’s national dress. And the thousand women who all turned up in the same frock – the one worn by Michelle Obama on daytime television that she bought for $50. It looked great on the tall, fit, black woman. It’s a cushion cover on a short, fat, white one. A bar mitzvah band plays Eighties easy listening for the delegates and little intro music for the speakers. They get up and dance in the aisles. It is the law of crowds that only the physically spavined and rhythmically incoherent will bop with unconcerned gusto in public.

In the press gallery the good-behaviour monitor who runs our lives asked me who I write for. And then, with a tone of stern disappointment, tells me there’s a dress code and I’ve fallen short. I was written a letter about it and please can I make an effort tomorrow. I dearly wanted to say, look down there. There are men dressed as Captain America. There are people in pink seersucker. But I didn’t. I said sorry, and I’ll come as Widow Twankey in the morning. She looked blank. “Okay sir, thank you for your attention.” I felt quite sprightly. I haven’t been told how to dress for 40 years. Next day she sidled past and said, sotto voce, “You look very nice.”

This year, for the first time, women are in the majority of conventioneers: 24% are black, 5% are Asian and Pacific Islanders, which is a good thing, even if the other 95% have no idea where they come from (a clerk in my hotel looked at my driving licence and said: “London. Switzerland, right?”).

Everything kicks off with a tribute to Ted “Zeppo” Kennedy. There is a sentimental video obituary broadcast on big screens. It’s a nice touch. Let him see it before he actually croaks. And, as a big surprise, the man himself corporeally materialises on stage. The dancing delegates get frenzied with the soap opera poignancy of the moment. Ted is dying of brain cancer and they couldn’t be happier. They hold up hundreds of placards saying “Kennedy” and just for a moment it looks as if they are there to remind him who he is.

The climax of the night is Michelle Obama. She is introduced by her brother, a basketball coach of the Oregon State Beavers, which pathetically again only I find funny. But her speech is pretty brilliant – cogent, warm. She tells the story of her life and background, compellingly and clearly, with empathy and confidence. She brings on her daughters. Obama appears like magic, like the Wizard of Oz, via a video link. They are that rare thing, a happy complete black family with money. I think it’s all rather lovely and, in the press gallery, I’m alone with this feeling. It’s difficult to decipher quite why Michelle is so loathed by right-wing hacks. She’s black, a lawyer, a woman and taller than most chat-show anchors. I suppose that makes her the most scrotum-shrivelling apparition: a black chick with a dick and writ.

Personal life stories of the Oprah type become the leitmotif of the conference. One after the other, every speaker gets up and begins by saying, with a cracking voice: “I want to tell you a story about a woman who came to this country with nothing but a dream. During the day she folded anchovies. In the evening she ironed for lapdancers. She had nothing to live in but her dream. She brought up 15 children. I am the youngest of those children and she put me through Harvard Law School by taking in taxidermy. There was always love in our home and road kill on the table.”

Cumulatively, these stories sound like the Yorkshireman’s sketch from Monty Python as a 12-step share. Each silky, coiffured and polished senator, congressman and governor outdoes the other with Stygian hardship. The effect is so cloyingly sentimental, it could give cynicism diabetes. But I am again the only one who finds the parade of Little Nell revelations hideously patronising. The implication being that if you don’t wind up at least as an Ivy League lawyer, then your poverty wasn’t bad enough and your dream isn’t lavish and American enough. The only person who doesn’t tell us about growing up in a bucket under the sink is Ted Kennedy, because we already know that he was born into patrician splendour paid for by illegal whisky-running during prohibition.

Three men suspected of trying to relive the Kennedy dream were arrested on the outskirts of Denver in a rented van, with a pair of rifles and a lot of methampheta-mine. One was called Adolf, which does not help if you’re in pursuit of the dream. This story looked exciting for a moment, until we were shown their mugshots on CNN, and then it was obvious that they were actually touring a stage version of Home Alone. The police say they can still tell the difference between a threat to Senator Obama’s life and three stoned white suprema-cists with guns. Which is comforting.

The convention is so stage-managed, the script so finely worded, the message so relentlessly repeated, that instead of the loons in tinsel, which are by their nature uncontrollable, there are posters and banners that are handed out to the crowd, with appropriate words and phrases, to be waved at appropriate moments. They are T-shirt mottoes without the T-shirt and, when the delegates waved them, it’s like one long Tourette’s stammer. It removes any sense of spontaneity or, indeed, individual thought. It’s all so mechanical, but we yearn for something to happen off-Autocue and for that we are relying on the Clintons.

In this soundbite circus they are Sieg-fried and Roy’s great white tigers. Despite the years of domestication and careful training and men with guns, they’re still wild animals and it could all go blissfully wrong. Hillary gets up and goes through the hoop of acclaiming Obama with a steely professionalism. She is admirable, if not loveable, and this speech is the best of her career, proving a salutary truth: that some politicians attain their true stature only in defeat.

Bill was something else. Something they don’t teach at Harvard or behind the bike sheds. What Bill has, you have to be born with, and it’s a gift beyond riches. He has political musk. He walks on the stage and it’s like he’s scent-marking. The ovation is thunderous and yearning. You can feel the dampness. The speech is fine: on paper it’s no better than a B-plus, but it’s the way he tells them. The crowd doesn’t hear what he’s saying – they get something else, some aural pheromone. It’s extraordinary to watch him work it, a syncopated, loose-limbed, baggy political Casanova, frotting them gently, killing them softly with his words. It’s extraordinary and it’s slightly pervy and grubby.

At the heart of this vast expensive micro-manipulated epic with its cast of thousands, there is an echoing minimalist pristine hole that is the place where the policies should be.

Even for those of us used to the mood music of new Labour, this is utterly devoid of detail. A wish list for better tomorrows, universal healthcare, more jobs, cheaper, cleaner fuel, better schools, affordable housing, no war and a lot of new foreign friends is plangent, but it lacks any detail.

Not just detail: there isn’t even an outline. The plan is . . . there is no plan. American politics has a built-in stasis of checks and balances. Changing anything is a long, slow, grinding affair. It’s all in the nuts and the bolts. Detail is all. But what the Democrats are offering is that dream. Every speaker has the dream, passes on the dream, keeps the dream alive, invokes their children’s names to feed the dream. They own part of the dream that is America. And it reminds me that this is the only country in the world where dreaming is supposed to be a good thing. When you wake to find it’s all a dream, that’s the end of the fairytale. The end of the dream is where real life starts, where you go back to being a janitor and a waitress, where you clip coupons and pray you don’t get cancer, and your kids get a charity scholarship. The absence of any new deal or cunning plan, or even the back of an envelope list, on how all this good stuff is going to be backed up, is worrying. Some might say reckless. Lots of America doesn’t have a dream because it can’t get to sleep because it’s terrified about the mortgage. The next T-shirt after “Yes we can” must simply ask, “How?”

The convention goes through its first three acts like Hamlet without its prince. A drama without Obama. He makes spectral appearances on screens, always in shirt-sleeves, offering brilliant homilies of Whitman-esque pathos and humanity. The rolling news channel pundits who spookily appear in threes, like the witches, offer fountains of advice, spells and premonitions. The expectation and speculation rise feverish and the Pepsi stadium is just too small to contain the energy of the final act. The set must be huge, larger than any convention before – 84,000 people are invited to the Mile High football stadium. On the pitch they build a kitsch neo-classi-cal facade that mimics the government buildings of Washington and, in particular, the Lincoln Memorial where, 45 years ago to the day, Martin Luther King Jr delivered the most famous speech of the 20th century. The auguries and destiny are begging for a transporting performance.

It doesn’t begin well. At 2 o’clock in the afternoon there’s a queue a mile or two hours long. Obama won’t speak for another six. The show slowly unfolds with awful redneck music and Stevie Wonder – who will now play any benefit or auction in the world – and there is a risibly Gilbert and Sullivanish lineup of generals, like a Miss World Domination contest. They wave coyly and want to work for world peace and with children and promise that Barack is their man. There are more personal stories of limbs and buddies left on the desert floor and then Al Gore races through his green speech like a fat man on thin ice.

And then before we’ve had time to compose ourselves, Obama steps onto the stage, rangy, handsome and composed, a thin dark knight come to reclaim Camelot. They cheer and cheer and cheer. The crowd grows into a single bellowing, adoring, rhythmic thing echoingly fascist. But then why should the Nazis have all the good tunes?

Obama says thank you, over and over, aware of prime time ticking away. His speech is long and repetitive and disjointed, like someone remembering a shopping list and a poem at the same time. Perhaps it’s an overdose of expectation, perhaps it’s the pointed criticism of the Republicans, who say he’s only a pretty wordsmith, a bearer of empty rhetoric. But the speech is underwhelming. It’s fine. Better than fine: it’s moving in parts. He lam-basts John McCain, he promises the complete liberal goodie bag, he makes much of the dignity of work, and I can’t help but notice the army of young volunteers who are exploited to run this whole performance and who probably pay for their own meals and travel.

There are occasional flashes of oratory and some transcendent insight: “This election was never about me.” His fine churchy voice rises: “It was always about you.” And the legions of the Obama’ed feel the truth of it. It is, indeed, all about them: “Change doesn’t come from Washington. You take change to Washington.” Inevitably, he remembers his family – but only the white half. Once, in passing, he mentions the man who gave him his talismanic blackness. Through the hush, out of the high stands, comes a long, eerie African ululation. The cry of Hamlet’s father.

Times Recommends

• Congo's rangers risk their lives to guard gorillas
• Pearl farming in China losing its lustre
• Axl Rose mystery as album arrives at last