Wow, what a night. I'm sure you all saw the awesome Bill Clinton speech, and John Kerry, and of course Joe Biden's acceptance speech, and the grand finale when Barack Obama joined his running mate on stage.

Hopefully you were watching C-SPAN, in which case you had the same seats as me, because I made the mistake of leaving the Tennessee delegation to go to the blogger lounge for a break and get some AC power to process some photos and videos and stuff. By the time I went back up the fire marshal was locking the place down and nobody was allowed in the arena due to the overwhelming turnout for Bill Clinton's speech. All the seats were full, all the aisles were full, and there wasn't even standing room. So I ended up watching on monitors out in the concourse with thousands of others.

Anyway, by far the most amazing and inspiring part of the evening was the historic nomination of Barack Obama for President of the United States. There appeared to be quite a bit of negotiation and minute-by-minute planning going on with regard to how the first ballot would proceed.

The names of Sen. Obama and Sen. Clinton were both put in nomination, and there were nominating and seconding speeches. Then it was announced there would be a roll call vote, which would proceed until there were enough votes for the nomination.

Gray Sasser and Kim Hayden were verifying the votes and entering them in to the DNC vote collection PC around 3PM.

Leading up to the roll call there was a flurry of communications with the delegations regarding who would yield and what would happen. It went from a roll call of every state, to having Hillary Clinton move to nominate Obama by acclamation. This seemed to go back and forth a couple of times, and you now how it ended up. One has to wonder if it finally came down to the overwhelming majority of votes Obama was racking up.

The roll call was originally scheduled for 7PM, and Governor Bredesen was to deliver the Tennessee delegation's votes. Somewhere along the way it got moved up to 4PM and Gov. Bredesen was not available, so Tennessee Democratic Party Chair Gray Sasser was on deck to deliver the votes. He was on pins and needles, going over his handwritten remarks, waiting to see if the roll call would make it down to the "T's" . (I believe he also got a call from the Governor's office regarding some specific points the Governor wanted to mention.) Somewhere along the way his father, former U.S. Senator Jim Sasser, showed up and provided moral support.

Then word came down that New York would have Sen. Clinton move for suspension of the rules and nomination of Obama by acclamation.

It was a dramatic moment, and a bit surreal to be there witnessing history in the making. Here's a low-q YouTube video that condenses about an hour of drama into ten minutes of history that hopefully gives a sense of what it was like to be there experiencing it with the Tennessee delegation...