Debbie Cook, the Democrat who ran unsuccessfully against Rep. Dana Rohrabacher for the 46th Congressional District last year, managed to score very good tickets to the presidential inauguration.

Guess how?

Rohrabacher “called me and asked if I wanted them,” Cook said.

I laughed. The two ran a tough campaign and like most races there were of course some hurt feelings , but it was nice to hear Rohrabacher do something that classy.

“I ran a nice clean campaign so I guess he didn’t have any hard feelings,” Cook said. “he just called and offered two tickets so of course I said yes.”

Debbie got tickets in the yellow section. Those were a bit better than my purple-section tickets.

“I don’t think he had a lot of Republican friends who wanted to go,” Cook joked.

Debbie and her husband John Fisher flew out to Dulles International Airport the Monday before the inauguration and a friend from Alexandria picked them up and drove them as close to the Capitol as possible so they could pick up their tickets from Rohrabacher’s office. Monday was an awful day to pick up tickets as I also discovered. Like Debbie I waited about an hour or so to get through security.

“I waited in line to get the tickets behind a doctor from Palos Verde who voted for me,” she said with a chuckle. “We were concerned because the building was supposed to close at 5. The line was really long, but I called [Rohrabacher’s office] and they said don’t worry that they could stay open until the whole line got through. I was pretty darned cold by the time I got up there.”

That was nothing. The next day her friend drove Debbie and John to the train station in Alexandria. They got started at 5:30 a.m. They were met with more lines. “We finally got to the bottom of the off-ramp and we said, ‘We’ll just get out and walk,’ the rest of the way. There was a huge line at the station but we didn’t have to wait too long to get on a train.”

They got on the train at 6:20 a.m. and a half-hour ride took 90 minutes. They even got off a station early to walk the rest of the way. Like me they walked here and there asking for directions, getting conflicting advice. They even ended up walking through the notorious Purple Tunnel of Doom where so many ticket-holders were stranded. “But we didn’t get stuck in it. We were walking against the flow of traffic, which was weird. People would stop us and say, ‘Where are you going?’ I don’t know where they were going but they weren’t going any place where they could see, that’s for sure.”

When they found an entrance for yellow ticket holders, “We found the line from hell, the longest line I’ve ever seen in my life because the line went further than the purple gate. People kept cutting in line, which was very frustrating because no one would call them out on it. But I would.”

Eventually they got the security gate at 10 a.m. and got to their seats by 10:30 a.m., plenty of time before the proceedings started at 11:30 a.m.

“You had a much worse time,” she told me.

Ohhh yeah. I sure did. But I digress.

She was especially tickled after the oath to get video of President Bush getting into the helicopter to leave the Capitol. She swung back and forth from the Jumbotron image of him getting into the helicopter to Bush himself. “I thought that was cool.”

They decided to hang out there to let the crowds thin out, but then found their train line had stopped. Finally they found a train about 4 p.m. and headed to Alexandria where their friend picked them up and took them to a nice Italian restaurant where they ran into one of Cook’s campaign supporters and discovered that the restrauteur, who ironically was a Republican, had enough juice to get a seat 7 feet behind Obama at the inauguration.

So what’s Debbie doing these days? She’s president of the nonprofit Post Carbon Institute and on the Assn. of Peak Oil and Gas-USA’s board of directors. I’ll tell you more about that soon. I want to meet with Cook and learn more about how she thinks we should handle our energy crisis.

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