Urban League President Marc Morial, and veteran journalist George Curry (a former Post-Dispatch writer decades ago, and old friend of yours truly) got the choice — and occasionally harrowing — jobs of, respectively, presiding over and moderating Friday’s presidential forum.

(Please note the mother ship already has an AP account of the forum online, which will be replaced in Saturday’s paper by my longer version. It WON’T include any of this account, which delves into some of the more humorous, or behind-the-scenes, aspects of the forum.)

The event got started on time, but there was some re-arranging of candidates because Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton was “running late,” a league representative said as she notified the press.

The candidates were to appear in alphabetical order: Clinton, former Sen. John Edwards, then Rep. Dennis Kucinich, then Sen. Barack Obama.

Kucinich and Clinton switched. (Note the other two big names retained their 2nd and 4th positions.)

Kucinich predictably went after the Iraq War, which he opposes. “We can’t wait until this presidential election to get out of Iraq,” Kucinich said.

But he particularly grabbed the audience’s attention when he talked about his early life as the oldest in a Catholic family with seven children. Always tight for money, the family always rented — never owned — their home.

By the time he was 17, the family had lived in 20 places. Kucinich also observed that he had several uncles who had ended up in prison, doing time.

As a result of his hard-knock life, Kucinich said he understand the importance of groups like the Urban League.

Edwards’ speech focused heavily on how “the system is rigged” by the corporate interests controlling the federal government. What was intriguing to some observers was that many of those seated in the front row of the forum theater were corporate executives, many of them from firms underwriting the forum or other aspects of the League’s four-day conference.

Edwards’ best-received line: If he’s sworn in, he’ll “ask Americans to be patriotic about something other than war.”

A little bit of time had to be killed after Edwards, before Clinton took to the stage. (Curry told the audience to talk amongst themselves, then alerted the crowd a minute later that the necessary delay would be a lot shorter than expected. Clinton had arrived.)

Clinton also was allowed to go over the 20-minute time restriction (the red light was flickering) for a few minutes to get her points across. (Kucinich and Edwards stuck to the limits.)

“I’m whipped up about this!” Clinton shouted, as she continued her address, which focused almost solely on the problems facing young black men.

She got the crowd whipped up as well, which cheered her enthusiastically as she ended her tour on stage. (She got fewer questions, because of her longer address.)

Clinton’s last line: “Let’s go out and make it happen!”

Then Obama walked on. And (borrowing a famous movie phrase) he had the predominantly African-American crowd at hello.

Obama largely stuck to his campaign themes — and he, like Clinton, got extra time. Obama got an extra 10-15 minutes, adding that he deserved it because he’d gotten on stage 45 minutes late (a subtle jab at her tardiness.)

But it was Obama’s ad-libs that really got the crowd.

As in…when Morial asked him, as he did the others, what Obama would do first on Jan. 20, 2009, if he was elected president.

The others had offered policy answers. Obama raised his hand as if he were being sworn in.

The audience loved it.

That pose also fit in with arguably Obama’s most artful reply.

When Morial asked him how he’d deal with the nation’s race issue, Obama replied, “The day I’m inaugurated, the country looks at itself differently.”