DENVER — U.S. Rep. Russ Carnahan remembers 28 years when he and several fellow 20-something friends drove to New York to catch some of the doings surrounding the 1980 Democratic presidential convention.

“We went as party crashers,” the congressman recalled with a chuckle, igniting more laughter from his audience of dozens of Missouri delegates at today’s convention breakfast.

He didn’t talk about his memories of the parties, but Carnahan did recall his most vivid recollection of that convention — Sen. Ted Kennedy’s “The Hope lives on, the Dream will never die” speech, amid his failure to oust then-President Jimmy Carter as the Democratic nominee.

The speech lives on as a classic (by far the best of Kennedy’s flawed 1980 campaign), but so are the wounds that convention never healed, Carnahan said.

“We’ve seen the price we’ve paid for that division,” Carnahan said, tieing the 1980 conflict to Ronald Reagan’s victory that fall. Over the next 28 years, Republicans have held the White House for all but 8 of them.

Carnahan then recounted the election loss of his father, the late Gov. Mel Carnahan, in his first bid for that office in 1984. His son recalled how his father, after losing to Ken Rothman in the Democratic primary, called Rothman the next morning to ask what he could do to help Rothman’s general election fight against Republican John Ashcroft. (Ashcroft won, of course, and the Carnahan-Ashcroft feud continued for 16 years.)

The younger Carnahan’s point was that unity matters. Bitter rivalries among Democrats must take a backdrop to the larger quest of defeating Republicans.

His sister, Secretary of State Robin Carnahan, followed up by lauding the Obama campaign’s decision to place dozens of campaign offices in Missouri, most of them in rural areas. “Our job is to go back home and speak the truth” about Obama, Carnahan said.

And their mother, former Sen. Jean Carnahan, recounted how inspirational Obama has been to a new generation. If he succeeds in getting elected, she said, he’ll stand up for the issues — health care, education, energy independence and ethics — that Democrats and most Americans care about.

But winning requires unity, she said.

In other words, no replay of 1980.