DENVER — It’s weird living in the nation’s capital, with Marine One constantly buzzing over your house as POTUS or VPOTUS head to Andrews Air Force Base. And “powerful people” wearing special lapel pins to indicate they are lawmakers or People Who Are Professional Pundits On Cable TV hanging around at the same restaurants and parties you do. It’s nice to get away and go to the real Amerricuh, where you can remove yourself from the proximity to power and its pitfalls.
But tonight, my escape to Denver was thwarted by the President. Blocks away from the bar where my friends Tim and Danielle were awaiting my arrival, my cab got blocked by cops. There was clearly Something Important Happening. I ended up walking to where I needed to be, only to be stopped because at the same moment I was supposed to arrive at the Wyncoop Brewery (co-founded by now Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper), a guy named Barack Obama pulled up with at least a dozen other black SUVs in tow.
As I’m outside being blocked from entering, the press pool rushes by, scurried in through a back door. That’s when my colleague Scott Horsley and I ran (almost literally RAN) into one another on the sidewalk. No time to talk, Secret Service rushed him in. I should have just joined them and snuck into the restaurant in that confusion, but instead I obeyed the rules, got pushed to this gawking area behind a barricade, until I talked two cops and a secret service guy into escorting me into the bar while the President was upstairs playing pool with the governor.
