Primary-season renegades in the front row

DENVER -- Minutes before Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg took the podium, a few Michigan Democrats in the fifth row of the Pepsi Center began to wonder how their state -- the one whose renegade primary, along with Florida's, threatened to disrupt the whole nominating calendar and send the convention into turmoil -- ended up sitting just a placard-as-paper-airplane's throw from the speaker.

“I was surprised that we are so close on the floor,” said Marian Novak, elected as a pro-Obama delegate on the "Uncommitted" slate. "I don't know how we got here."

Three months ago, Democratic National Committee rules determined that none of Michigan's delegates would be seated at the convention, the cost of having scheduled a January primary that violated party policy. Only a compromise deal, delicately brokered at the end of the primary season, assured that Michigan and Florida would have any place at the convention. The agreement said nothing about getting a nice patch of floor space well in front of such rule-abiding states as Ohio and Nebraska.

"The troublemakers always win in the end," concluded Ethel Schwartz, 91, who has served as a precinct delegate to every state convention held the mid-1930s and has attended national conventions as a delegate beginning in 1968. This year, she is in Denver as a guest: in the controversial January primary, she ran, unsuccessfully, to be a Dennis Kucinich delegate.

"That's why our hotel is in Flatiron. That should tell you something," said Patricia Tupacz Scribner, a Clinton delegate. "It's close to Boulder. Isn't it funny we’re all the way out there? No wonder we had such good seats."