| Day One: NOI and the pre-Conference conference.
Although Netroots Nation proper didn't start until Thursday morning, I actually arrived Tuesday evening in order to attend a pre-conference session being held on Wednesday by a group called the New Organizing Institute, or NOI, held in a donated conference room in the Alcoa building. (Which, as it happens, you get to by riding in an elevator covered with chain mail that could double as the set of a sci-fi movie.) You can see a more detailed report on the content of that afternoon's discussions and information here. Apparently there's a standing rule that all NOI sessions must be followed up with alcohol, so the attendant happy hour was at a nearby bar called Tonic.
Although the NOI event was small, probably only around 30 people, more and more Netroots types kept drifting in during that early evening, since we were right across the street from both the Westin hotel and the convention center. So by the time that our group pulled up stakes and went out for dinner, we'd somehow managed to pick up Alaska bloggers Shannyn Moore and Mudflats. These two, it later came out, had just arrive in Pittsburgh from Alaska via Houston, and if that sounds like flying from Buffalo to Atlanta to DC, you're not wrong. The only excuse for the direct flight from Houston to Alaska? Oilmen.
Dinner was at a Pittsburgh landmark named Primanti Brothers, which specializes in sandwiches served with a topping of french fries and coleslaw, all literally on the sandwich. While I admit I was dubious about this, the result is actually tasty... and, as it turns out, is endorsed by Jon Stewart.
Day Two: Panels, speeches, and the Andy Warhol museum
My second full day there was the first of the conference proper, starting bright and early at 9 AM with the first panel I attended, "Online Congressional Engagement Beyond Twitter" followed by "Scaling Obama: Applying the Online Campaigning Lessons of '08 to State and Local Races." The panels contain far too much detail to do them justice, but for the most part were well executed and interesting, even when they covered topics I already knew about.
After a break for food and to cool off in the hotel room's air conditioning, I ended up checking out another panel entitled "The Secret Plan to Defeat the Right Forever." Mostly out of curiousity, I admit--I wasn't sure how they were going to make a 75-minute panel discussion out of "providing rope." As it turns out, the discussion was about unions and the Employee Free Choice Act, along with a great deal of information on how union members and households vote, particularly compared to non-union members. The short version? Union members are more likely to vote for Democratic and progressive candidates by margins from five to fifty points higher than the same demographics of non-union members. The panel also talked about the relevance of EFCA to people trying to form unions, and why current union rules are toothless to the point where companies ignore them at will.
That evening, the speeches started. I must say that the program ran much too long: when you're not feeding people, you really can't expect to be able to go through more than a few speakers without getting bored. Two and a half hours is excessive. Still, it was worth the periodic bites of boredom in order to hear Representative Brad Miller of North Carolina (parts one and two, and of course eventually we got to the main event: Bill Clinton. (Parts one, two, three, four, five, and six). The full speeches are worth watching, so I won't try to recap them too much here.
Clinton's speech was arguably both the most unexpected and the most topical, striking out at both the popular impression of him in the party base as a centerist president who caved on gay rights issues, as well as exhorting the netroots to support President Obama's agenda vigorously in the face of opposition from the right, lest we lose the initative.
The "Official unofficial after party" was to be held at the Andy Warhol museum, which was just a short horrendously hot (at 10:30 PM!) march across the Andy Warhol bridge from the convention center. I can't say the afterparty did much for me. The Warhol museum was, it turns out, apparently built with the intention of being used as a strategic strongpoint against an invading army--as such, it's filled with bottlenecks designed to make people stop moving at the worst possible moment. Add to that the fact that the noise level was absolutely appalling: imagine 500 people in a large room, shoulder to shoulder, all of them trying to be heard over all the others. On the bright side, I now know the proper descriptive word to use on a crowd like that. It's not a herd of bloggers, or a flock of bloggers, or a gaggle of bloggers. It's a riot. A riot of bloggers.
On the bright side I did meet some people I hadn't seen in awhile, including everyone's favorite former candidate for the New York 26th Congressional District, Jon Powers, who's now happily ensconced at the Truman National Security Project as their Chief Operating Officer. He sends his best to all the folks still back home in the 26th District, and is working on good stuff.
That concludes part one. Stay tuned for part two. |
