DENVER — Nothing has technically happened yet, except for a lot.

I arrived in Denver for the grand DNC gathering very late Saturday night. As such, Sunday afternoon provided the first opportunity to venture into the heart of the quadrennial Democratic frenzy. On convention eve, there were other related happenings of relevance to New Mexico’s representatives, official and unofficial, to the convention that officially kicks off today.

3:12 p.m. on a slow-moving Lincoln Avenue snaking through downtown Denver

The police presence in Denver is impressive. Or overkill, depending on your perspective. There are roving bands of police officers on bikes, on horseback, in cars and on foot — from law enforcement departments all across Colorado.

Early-arriving anti-Iraq war protesters are also well-represented, but for sheer shock value, they don’t yet match the anti-abortion protesters. The group Operation Rescue has deployed circling delivery trucks with oversize messages tacked on the side. Barack Obama as Uncle Sam is tame compared to "this billboard plastered across another Operation Rescue truck.

4:05 p.m. at the Colorado Media Matters office for a blogger training

Over a dozen new media journalists are seated around a table, each with laptop computers in front of them, listening to the Washington Independent’s very talented national security reporter, Spencer Ackerman. The former New Republic writer and Talking Points Memo blogger talked about traditional journalist techniques like working sources, being scrupulously fair, breaking news, but also new media tricks like “squibs” (that is, extremely short blog posts) the value of news aggregation, and real interactivity with readers.

Ackerman argues – very persuasively, I might add – that online journalists are on the ground floor of a new model of journalism that will eventually, he says, be the norm. And soon.

6:11 p.m. with University of New Mexico political scientist Christine Sierra

Over a glass of red wine, crackers, cheese and a sliced Velarde, New Mexico peach, Sierra talks (and I listen) about the simple reason she’s here: to bear witness to history. Sierra says that she knew she’d be coming to Denver as soon as it became clear that either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama would be the Democratic presidential nominee.

By the way, Sierra will be posting her thoughts on her first-ever national party convention on NMI as well as KNME’s convention blog.

7:21 p.m. at the New Mexico Chairman’s Welcome just off of Denver’s Union Station

The party for New Mexico’s delegation to the convention spilled over two luxury trains parked at the station. According to the party’s program, the event was hosted by Union Pacific Railroad. The company’s largess is responsible for singing waiters ferrying plates of fancy finger food, and better yet, an open bar.

Sitting at a table next to said open bar I couldn’t help but think back to the question I asked ex-Democratic Party of New Mexican Chairman John Wertheim on last week’s New Mexico In Focus about corporate sponsorship at the convention. At the time, Wertheim essentially said he wasn’t concerned about undue corporate influence at the convention. But he did get some good-natured revenge, pointing out the potential hypocrisy of this reporter attending a corporate-sponsored event. In the name of full disclosure, I even consumed one vodka on the rocks mixed with some Squirt.

It was actually quite good.

Over at Joe Monahan’s blog, he’s got an alligator telling him that the members of the New Mexico press, like the Santa Fe New Mexican’s Steve Terrell, who attended event were shunned with no one to talk to. That’s not really the case, but even so, Terrell is quite good company. Not only did he recount the epic Dave Cargo v. Fabian Chavez gubernatorial showdown when Terrell was but a Santa Fe school boy, he also fleshed out some useful comparisons to the ’04 Democratic convention in Boston which he also attended. (Read the Santa Fe Reporter’s Dave Maass’ full-throated response to Monahan’s post here.)

Before I left the luxury train at 9:23 p.m., I did manage to squeeze in a brief interview with New Mexico superdelagate Fred Harris.

Sitting at a comfy lounge car table, I ask Harris to talk about the pivotal role he played in making conventions like the one that will soon gavel to order, well, a bit anti-climactic. That’s because conventions no longer actually pick presidential nominees. Today, they merely ratify the choice of the voters. But that wasn’t always the case.

In fact, it was Harris, the U.S. senator from Oklahoma who served concurrently as DNC chairman in 1969 – a year after the Democratic debacle that was the ’68 convention in Chicago – who pushed the party reforms that gave the country the modern primary and caucus system we have today.

“The Democratic Party wasn’t democratic,” Harris explains. “It didn’t have enough women… and African Americans were actively excluded from any participation… and the party was terribly boss-ridden. Governors and mayors just actually chose the delegates. And that seemed to me undemocratic,” he adds. “I decided when I was chairman that we ought to make the Democratic Party live up to what it called itself.”

And so it happened. Harris goes on to proudly note that today’s Democratic Party convention delegates are much more reflective of the party’s rank-and-file in terms of gender, race and ethnicity. That wasn’t the case back in ’68.

"No, not at all,” Harris says. He then tells a colorful story from the ’68 convention about how Robert F. Kennedy was cheated out of support from the Philadelphia delegation due to the old party rule book. (To listen to the entire, Harris interview, click here.)

But what about this past year’s intense primary competition between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama that could still lead to a messy convention on top of lingering hard feelings?

Harris, in his thoughtful, Oklahoma drawl, answers: "Well, there were a lot of hard feelings in the old days, but there was no way to express them. The bosses just pretty much decided who would be the nominee… To paraphrase Winston Churchill, democracy is messy. You know, it often makes a spectacle of itself but it beats any other system you can think of.”

10:46 p.m. at the “Chairman’s Late Night Reception” at the swanky Churchill’s Brown Palace Hotel

One more open bar before the night is done. And this one is jam-packed with prominent New Mexico Democrats like former Speaker Raymond Sanchez, ex-chief counsel to Gov. Bill Richardson Geno Zamora, state Rep. Antonio Maestas, the afore-mentioned John Wertheim, congressional candidate Ben Ray Lujan, DNC Committeewoman Mary Gail Gwaltney and Rio Arriba County Democratic Party Chairwoman Annadelle Sanchez.

Oh, and a good smattering of New Mexico media types were there, too.

Maass of the Santa Fe Reporter was there, as was Terrell of the New Mexican, and Matthew Reichbach of the Independent, too.

New York Times reporter Dan Frosch, formerly a staff writer at the Santa Fe Reporter, was also in the room filled with the cigar smoke. (Read the convention story he filed for the Times here.) Frosch, who works out of the Times Denver bureau, told me a surprising factoid about the convention to date: not a single protester had been arrested.

Apparently, Denver’s convergence of Democrats and assorted malcontents are mostly behaving themselves – at least so far.