After clinching the Democratic nomination in June, Barack Obama famously declared that "generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment . . . when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." Former Denver Mayor Federico Pena didn't quite match this staggering spasm of self-praise when he spoke Tuesday at the Democratic National Convention, but he took a shot at it.

"When I became mayor of Denver in 1983," Pena declared, "everyone knew we had a serious problem with air pollution. On a bad day, you could barely see our magnificent mountains. Some people said we couldn't fix it. Our economy was in a recession, and we were struggling with the shock of an energy crisis. Sound familiar? But we knew we couldn't afford more of the same and we made a decision to change.

"We started using cleaner fuels. We invested in mass transit. Everyone chipped in and did their part. And a funny thing happened. Our city got cleaner and our economy started to grow. We took our future into our own hands. We built a new airport for the new century."

Longtime Denverites must have been shaking their heads at this garbled history. A few problems:

* The "energy crisis" of 1983 involved the price of oil collapsing from a worldwide glut, hardly the issue we have today. On May 2, 1982 - Black Sunday, as it came to be called - Exxon announced it was closing its Colony Oil Shale Project on the Western Slope, and prices continued to decline through the mid-1980s to below $15 a barrel.

* The biggest reason for the shrinking brown cloud over the years has been cleaner-burning vehicles - remember how badly diesels used to smoke? - as opposed to policies enacted by local officials. (OK, bans on wood burning and cutbacks in winter sanding were helpful, too.) For that matter, how can anyone seriously attribute the city's economic recovery to progress on pollution when it had been under way before the economy tanked, too?

* "Invest in mass transit"? Was Pena referring to the light-rail spur from the Broadway station through downtown that opened in 1994, when the economy was on a roll? Good grief. The full Southwest Line wasn't even authorized until years later. And the RTD sales tax wasn't hiked until 2004.

Pena is right that government plays a critical role in providing up-to-date infrastructure, and he deserves tremendous credit for pushing to build Denver International Airport in the face of fierce criticism. It has been a boon to the region. But the idea that local political leaders decisively influenced the business cycle of the 1980s is as overstated as a promise to "transform" the economy in two or three simple steps.

Not that anyone we know is making that sort of claim these days, of course.

Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.