August 29, 2008 1:32 PM

Steve Farber at the DNC

Breakfast was being served to movers and shakers in the Democratic party on tables set on the stage of the Ellie Caulkins Opera House downtown.
On that morning in 2006, Denver lawyer Steve Farber took a break from his plate of eggs and told Howard Dean that 98 years before, William Jennings Bryant, "on this very stage," accepted the Democratic nomination for president.
Two years after that breakfast -- and 100 years after Bryant's acceptance speech -- Barack Obama repeated history in Denver on Thursday night.
That opera house breakfast meeting was one of the many behind-the-scenes roles that Farber played in bringing the DNC to Denver.
"Steve was one of the key players in bringing the Democratic National Convention to Denver, in what is one of the most successful conventions in Democratic history," Dean told the Rocky Mountain News late Wednesday night at the birthday party for Leah Daughtry, the CEO of the 2008 Democratic National Convention Committee. Ironically, the party was at the Ellie Caulkins Opera House.
Farber, one of Denver's biggest power brokers when it comes to Democratic politics, has helped raise millions of dollars for the DNC.
The president of Brownstein Hyatt Farber & Schreck, Farber is a co-chairman for the Denver Host Committee. And though his influence is well-known here, it stretches throughout the country on a variety of fronts.
He has played tennis with Sen. Ted Kennedy and has golfed with former President Clinton. Former Denver Mayor Federico Peña and former Secretary of Interior Gale Norton have worked at his firm. While still a law student at the University of Colorado, he spent three hours with Bobby Kennedy, on one of his rare appearances in Denver, in the spring of 1968. The day after Farber graduated from law school, Kennedy was assinated in Los Angeles. Today, he is on a first-name basis with some of the richest people in the U.S.
At the same time, he knows all of the wait staff and chefs at the Capitol Grillecq in lower downtown..
He's the Daddy Warbucks of Denver, although at age 64 he still has a full head of hair, unlike the fictional Warbucks.
"Certainly, Steve has a lot of credibility and has relationships with a number of corporations and successful individuals," said Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper.
"I think that his credibility certainly had a significant influence on us making our bid," the mayor continued. "He has made hundreds of calls, hundreds of visits. This has been a major part of his life for the past 18 months."
Farber, who accompanied Hickenlooper and Gov. Bill Ritteron a number of business trips seeking the needed funding for the convention - from Las Vegas to Wall Street - played down his role, even as others do not.
Farber, who gave credit to Hickenlooper, Ritter and former City Council President Elbra Wedgeworth and others for getting the convention to the city, said he would never have seriously floated Denver for the convention a decade ago -- although President Clinton had appointed him to the selection committee in 1998, which chose Los Angeles for the DNC in 2000.
"I would have loved to have seen them come to Denver ... -- we're a wonderful city-- but I realized we had a hotel issue, we didn't have enough rooms," Farber said.
While in Washington, D.C., the committee asked him to make a pitch for Denver.
He said he looked at a sheet of area hotel rooms, and noticed it included two cities in Wyoming.
"We have something like 16,000 hotel rooms in the area, including those in Cheyenne and Casper, which are only a 20-minute drive away," Farber recalled erroneously saying. "I didn't realize it was being filmed by C-Span," he said.
But with thousands of new hotel rooms downtown, hotels near Denver International Airport, and rooms an easy light-rail ride from the Denver Tech Center, that no longer posed an obstacle, he said.
Farber said that he and others also had to convince Dean that they could "raise the excess of $50 million that we needed," to host the convention.
Beyond the hotels and money issues, Western states are more important than ever as far as determining whether a Democrat or a Republican will be victorious in November, so Denver makes sense strategically, Farber said.
Early on, Farber met with some prominent Republicans, including Dick Notebaert, then the CEO of Qwest Communications, and executives at Molson Coors, to successfully lobby them to pony up millions of dollars as major sponsors.
"It really wasn't a Democratic or a Republican thing in that respect," Farber said. "It was an unprecedented way to showcase our city."

Posted by John Rebchook at 1:32 PM | Comments (0)