Yearly Kos: Everything You Need To Know

OK, I'm finally getting around to posting about Yearly Kos. Well, at least the second half of it. I was pretty good at posting about the first half and then trailed off. So let me just bullet-point some random thoughts. I'm going to go more in-depth on the Presidential forum and the Edwards break-out session afterwards.

• The Netroots candidate event was one of my favorite events, and the Teamsters barbecue was the other. The true spirit of Yearly Kos (which next year will be called Netroots Nation) is found in these mass social events where you can talk to a large group of people from all parts of the blogosphere. There were over 30 candidates for 2008 at the Convention, and among my favorites were Congressional candidates Gary Trauner (WY-AL), Darcy Burner (WA-08) and Scott Kleeb (NE-03); and Senate candidates Jay Buckey (NH) and Steve Novick (OR). My night of drinking with Scott Kleeb really deserves its own post, but I should mention that Steve Novick is kind of awesome. A lawyer and activist in the Paul Wellstone mold, Steve was the lead counsel on the Love Canal case. He's also a short man with a hook for a hand, and instead of shying away from that, he discusses it proudly. Votehook.com is his website, and he refers to himself as a "fighter with a strong left hook!" It's great to see someone with a disability running for Senate and offering that kind of perspective. He rocks.

• We actually sucked the hotel bar dry. On Sunday night they were out of beer. Completely out. (This is mainly because McCormick Place is nowhere near anything and so the hotel bar became the meeting place) On Friday and Saturday Drinking Liberally held some patio parties, and Saturday night's was marred by intermittent thunderstorms. I noticed that less and less people would run in from out of the rain after each re-occurrence.

• During the Presidential forum, Mike Stark calmly sat with a sign in the front row that said "Hillary: Stop Lying." She had to look at it for two hours. I should note that I spent a couple hours on Saturday helping out Stark with a controversial video of him confronting Bill O'Reilly at his house. You can see it at Brave New Films' blog.

• My friend Paul Hogarth has written an incredible article about Hillary Clinton's experience at the event which is far richer and deeper than most of the Big Media thumbsuckers I've seen. His thesis is that Clinton's performance has endangered her hopes at the nomination, and I don't know if he's right, but certainly her ringing defense of DC lobbyists at the debate didn't help her, and Hogarth's amazing question in a breakout session about her stance on the worst legislation of her husband's tenure - welfare reform, the Telecommunications Act, DOMA, and NAFTA - left her tongue-tied. But Hogarth didn't report the best part: late on Saturday night, two Hillary supporters accosted him and tried to get him to change his mind about her!

• Digby (who I can sort of count as a friend now. Weird.) is right in part. There was far more diversity at this year's event, the gender ratio was almost even, and the black and Latino communities were more represented (though not as much as I'd like). The under-representation of these communties in the general blogosphere is a function of class, which is why we need to wire poor and rural communities as sure as we needed rural electrification in the 1930s. It's also an expensive convention to attend, which is why I hope Kid Oakland's amazing grant program, which paid to bring 17 poor and rural men and women from all over the country to the convention, continues to expand.

• Ezra Klein thinks that the netroots represents a bunch of policy wonks because that's the convention HE went to. I saw a lot of local blogging panels so I think it's about local empowerment. There was enough material here for 4 or 5 conventions, and I'm turning around a bit on this. Maybe it's good that you can customize your experience, as long as there are enough unifying moments as well.

• This post by Rick Jacobs made me very proud to be a part of this community. Key graf:

And that's the real learning here. The "movement" is growing up fast. People want to build from the ground up, taking the best of ideas, research and activism to lead on local and state issues. That's what the right wing did for decades. They worked slowly but inexorably on issues. The candidates they ultimately elected carried those issues for them and contorted America. The online communities are embracing the slow work necessary to build and win, aware that working locally can, and always does, lead to national success, aware too that online activism is transparent and increasingly the bedrock of democracy.

The MSM actually got a good bit of this convention right, but as usual the bloggers had the best perspectives.

• There was one event that the Right picked up on at Yearly Kos, a shouting match between Jon Soltz of VoteVets and a pro-war soldier. The soldier was wearing his uniform and violating military policy by engaging in politics while wearing it, that was the entire subject of the feud. He knows this, because in a far less-attended Iraq Veterans Against The War panel on Sunday, the same soldier came in and said "He (Soltz) violated the law too," essentially admitting that he did break the law with his actions.

And yes, Ezra's right about this:

SO let's be clear here: No one at the Kos panel searched out the questioner's wedding registry, no one at the Kos panel dug up his old poetry to embarrass him, no one at the Kos panel speculated on what a terrible soldier he is and how much he must have slowed his unit down, no one at the Kos panel unearthed his MySpace page, no one at the Kos panel said "he'd better watch his ass."

And yet, merely a week after the Right did all that to Private Beauchamp -- whose story has been proven true in virtually all respects, with the singular error misremembering the location of one of the stories -- they have the audacity to accuse members of YearlyKos of proving insufficiently supportive of the troops. And they're doing so over an argument that was not between a room of people, or a conference of people, and a soldier, but between -- and limited to -- two soldiers.

• One of my favorite panels was "Creating A New News" with SusanG from Daily Kos, Andrew Golis of TPM, Will Bunch of Attytood and Jay Rosen of PressThink. This was really about the distributed model that the Internet affords journalism to use, which allows citizens to become engaged in their media. Plus, it included my favorite quote of the weekend, by Joel Connolly of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: "I'm sorry that those of you on the left side can't see some of our panelists. But the podium, like David Broder, is immovable." Heh. Andrew Golis also had a great line: "Do what you do best, and link to the rest." I'll try to remember that.

I'm sure I could continue to fill a book with this, but I'll stop. Here, though, are some pics.

Me and clammyc:



S.R. Sidarth ("Macaca"), Lane Hudson, Mike Stark:



The panelist's-eye view from the California caucus (name mispelled):



California Congressional candidates Charlie Brown, Ron Shepston, Steve Young and Russ Warner:



Howard Dean:



Late night:



Wes Clark:



Me and Ned Lamont!



The netroots candidates:



Ron Shepston up front, Digby in the back: