DENVER, CO -- The holder of Colorado’s liquor license No. 1, the Buckhorn Exchange, sits on the outskirts of Denver and displays 600 stuffed fauna in its tiny confines. Four presidents, from Theodore Roosevelt to Bill Clinton, have dined there.

And amid the impalas and the cougars, there sit jackalopes: jackrabbits crossed with antelopes, i.e. rabbits with antlers.

“I’m Irish, so when I first got here, it was six months before I found out they were fake,” Buckhorn staff member Matt Carroll remembered. “Then I said, ‘But there’s six of them!’”

On Thursday night, every TV in the Buckhorn showed Invesco Field at Mile High, just two miles away. Over 80,000 people waited inside to witness the Democratic Party’s own jackalope, Barack Obama, a biracial candidate who often says he will bridge the old divides of partisanship with a new kind of politics.

Many similar-minded supporters in the audience had local connections, like Steve Jurvetson ’88, a managing director of Draper Fisher Jurveston.

“Politics today is dogmatic and platform-driven,” said Jurvetson, who arrived at Invesco having met Obama several times already. “Obama synthesizes divergent views.”

For instance, at previous talks, “Obama would empathize with the rural hunter, then flip to the inner city and talk about gun show loopholes,” Jurvetson said. “By convincingly portraying both sides, he doesn’t seem offensive to either side of the debate.”

Similarly, Jurvetson is an atheist, but he has faith in Obama’s ability to separate his Christian beliefs from his governance.

“[Obama] talked about religion as a powerful force for society, often for good, and connected it to things dear to him, social movements like abolition,” Jurvetson said. “But he went on to say [religion] must be translated [into rational] argument ... he said if you can’t reason, democracy breaks down.”

Local Gunn High School graduate, former Obama campaign national high school director and delegate (CD-14) Molly Kawahata sounded off on the same theme.

“Our generation really wants to get past partisan politics,” Kawahata said. “The emphasis of a lot of campaigns and people in power is just to defeat the other party ... growing up, that’s frustrated a lot of [young] people ... there’s a lot of disdain for the process.”

For Kawahata, the primary appeal of Obama’s message of change is process-oriented.

“I know a lot of conservatives, independents, who voted for Bush, [who now support Obama],” she said. “I don’t think you need to agree on all the issues to agree with his approach to politics.”

Kamala Harris, delegate and District Attorney of San Francisco, hit the same note and said Obama would integrate what are usually seen as opposing values.

“Caring about issues or family ... choosing between public safety and civil liberties -- [those are] false choices,” Harris said.

Of course, Obama’s ability to inspire visions of bipartisanship didn’t mean everyone at Invesco was thrilled to be there. Earlier on Thursday, TIME Magazine and Los Angeles Times journalist Joel Stein ’93 said the convention speeches were “designed to look great on TV and boring in person,” and that he didn’t want to thirstily wait for five hours in line to get into Invesco.

“But I don’t want to be the jerk who’s like, ‘I was there, but didn’t feel like going,’” Stein added.

At one point, the line outside reached six miles long, according to frustrated people calling friends inside the stadium. As people streamed in, announcers tried to get everyone to text a show of support to 62262 (OBAMA), harvesting cell numbers for future use.

When Obama finally arrived, he delivered the lines Jurvetson, Kawahata and Harris had been waiting for. As John Dickerson of Slate magazine later wrote, Obama was expected to do nothing less than “summon winged chariots.”

Instead, Obama told the crowd, “Let me spell out exactly what that change would mean if I am president,” and proceeded to a laundry list of details. But he did leave space for the soaring rhetoric for which he has become famous (or notorious), including a section defining “the American promise.”

“It's a promise that says each of us has the freedom to make of our own lives what we will, but that we also have the obligation to treat each other with dignity and respect.”

“[...] that says the market should reward drive and innovation and generate growth, but that businesses should live up to their responsibilities"

“[...] that says government cannot solve all our problems, but what it should do is that which we cannot do for ourselves”

“[...] the idea that we are responsible for ourselves, but that we also rise or fall as one nation; the fundamental belief that I am my brother's keeper; I am my sister's keeper.”

In merging the rhetoric of the left and the right, Obama again roused the crowd in Invesco to its feet, temporarily pausing the thousands of cameras flashing during his 46-minute speech. A section that riffed on his 2004 convention keynote address received one of the biggest ovations:

“The men and women who serve in our battlefields may be Democrats and Republicans and independents, but they have fought together and bled together and some died together under the same proud flag. They have not served a Red America or a Blue America -- they have served the United States of America.”

On a warm Thursday night in Denver, 84,000 people leapt to their feet and roared their belief in the jackalope before them. This November, the nation will decide if, unlike the six jackalopes at the Buckhorn Exchange, Obama is more than a convincing fantasy.