The 2008 Democratic National Convention is passing with a welter of hugs. Things are going as hoped for. The Clintons are behaving. Joe Biden is tough and globally wise. The Obamas are the new-age, all-American family.

Out there in Denver we have watched the delegates applaud the shaky but determined appearance of the Kennedy patriarch, Teddy, fighting off his brain cancer to receive the kind of cheers the Kennedys always receive in honor of public trauma past.

While the lobbyists outside the big tent were opening their luxury hospitality suites, Michelle Obama gave her keynote speech in which she assured the delegates – and the estimated 40 million TV audience – that she loved her husband, her brother, her mother, her father, her daughters, and her country. At the end there were cute kids,

There is so much love going on that one almost wishes for a snarl or two, a little ruckus to give a nod to the country as it is right now—going broke, at war, and worried.

As a veteran of ten conventions I tend to look on these quadrennial fests as little more than tribal dancing. All, that is, except for one. Chicago, August 1968.

Since those of us who were serving as press grunts in those days are in the midst of the Great 40-year Remembrance, I dug out my clips from the time. Just a by-line in those days, not a columnist yet. And lacking the clout, at first, to convince my city editor that the real story was not the Amphitheater that the old man, Richard J. Daley, had tarted up with hedgerows and flowers so that the delegates couldn’t see the bust-out neighborhoods beyond.

The protesters, the “kids” (“What’s a “hippie?” the city editor had wanted to know) had taken over the streets, and the cops – seeing kids much like their own rushing at them shouting dirty words – did what they would do at home: They smacked them.

And so it went. But there was true anger there, generational, cultural, and because we had a draft and young men were going to war, rage.

Frankly, if all the reporters, protesters, politicians who now say they were where they say they were in Chicago in late August 1968, the Hilton Hotel bar – for one place – would have imploded like the Hindenberg. And the “Whole World is Watching” wouldn’t have been watching because the streets would have been too crowded to get the TV trucks in.

For most of us who were trying to report what was happening the most imperative thing was to get to a phone booth and “call it in”. No cell phones in those days. In my case the concierge at the Hilton obliged, and I am still ever so grateful, although the desk man at my newspaper told me I was over-reacting, being new and all.

The ’68 vets have separate perspectives: There were the politicians, some at the Amphitheater, some in their campaign headquarters in the hotels overlooking Michigan Avenue, who were…as quoted subsequently .. “appalled”. There were the political operatives, the new consultants, who were frantically trying to reach their bosses to tell them how to react.

There were the “chroniclers” like Mailer and the rest, who were in for the show. There were the cops who were trying to keep the thing orderly the way they had been instructed to do. There were the reporters trying for a scoop, and the protest organizers who needed to make the thing newsworthy, and the kids of the National Guard peering from under steel helmets who weren’t sure what they were supposed to do. They only knew that they were scared.

There was anger and longing at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. And later came some change. Some of that came from the Amphitheater, most came from the streets. It was, in all, a very good convention.

Now, let’s see 40 years later, what comes from Denver and Minneapolis, 2008.

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Dorothy Storck is a regular columnist for the Chicago Daily Observer