DENVER, Sept. 2 (UPI) -- It has been four years since I filed my first articles for UPI. "Come to Boston and write for us," Martin Walker, then editor in chief, now editor emeritus, had said to me. So I did. And I became a stringer for the 2004 Democratic Convention.

About a year later, I was offered my own column.

U.S. political conventions are bizarre animals. Europeans and non-Americans in general marvel at and are intimidated by the frenetic activity, a mixture of glitz and shtick. It is loud. It is crazy -- what can only be described as typical Americana.

This year I brought a small delegation to Denver: Kurt Bodewig, vice chairman of the Bundestag's International Affairs Committee and formerly Germany's minister of transportation; Karl A. Lamers, vice chairman of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly and member for my home town Heidelberg; Jens-Hald Madsen, chairman of Global Panel Nordic and until recently foreign affairs spokesman for the Danish prime minister; and Barbara Day, a friend of Vaclav Havel and a respected British anticommunist fighter.

Just prior to the convention I had been in upstate New York for a fundraiser for Dan Maffei. Dan is a bright 40-something candidate for Congress in the Syracuse area. He had run two years ago and nearly unseated Jim Walsh. On this very sunny Friday, Sen. Hillary Clinton was the keynote at the residence of the Rothenbergs -- longtime upstate New York supporters of the senator.