In Denver, Riesen feeling his old newsman instincts

DENVER — Utah delegate Phil Riesen was kicking back at a sidewalk cafe in downtown Denver, watching the adult circus known as the Democratic National Convention, when a band of protesters marched by followed by an army of black-shirted SWAT policemen.

Instinctively, he almost got out of his chair.

Not so he could join them. So he could interview them.

"I'm sitting there picking out stories," says Riesen. "It was like second nature."

But he resisted the urge to actually get up, for several good and important reasons beyond the fact that he hadn't yet finished his drink.

He didn't have a cameraman with him, he didn't have a microphone, and he hasn't worked in TV for more than a decade.

"You always find the best stories when you're not working," smiles Riesen.

Not that he isn't working as a convention delegate, but it's a far different kind of duty from the career he left behind in journalism. These days, he's the one being interviewed, not the other way around.

This is Riesen's first national political convention as a delegate but the fifth he has attended in person. As a correspondent for KALL Radio and then a news anchor for Utah's ABC affiliate, Channel 4, he covered conventions in 1972 in Miami (Democrat), 1984 in Dallas (Republican) and San Francisco (Democrat) and 1988 in Atlanta (Democrat).

The first one was the most memorable. He was a young newsman summoned to a news conference in Miami where aides to nominee George McGovern announced the breaking news that there had been a break-in at Democratic headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington.

The conventions fascinated him. Politics fascinated him.

"It wasn't like I constantly thought about it," he says. "But a small part of me always thought, 'Gee, I'd like to do that someday."'

He first left the mainstream media for the political world in 1999 as a nonpaid volunteer with the campaign of Ross "Rocky" Anderson, who was running for mayor of Salt Lake City.

Rocky won and hired Riesen as his first director of communications. Twenty-three days later he was called into the mayor's office.

"I was told we had to come up with an exit strategy," Riesen recollects.

For himself.

Riesen turned out to be the first of more than 40 people who would be fired or resign during Anderson's tenure. He looks back on it now as "a good learning experience," but he's still stunned that it happened. He suspects his identifying with the media might have been a factor.

"I was told I needed to work the press," says Riesen. "I said, 'I work with the press, I don't work the press.' I think that got back to Rocky."

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