Final (hopefully) Conversation on YearlyKos

And this will conclude my non-coverage of the YearlyKos/Democratic convention. (I know I said I was talking to independents as Shaun Mullen was making cookies and so it was.... I understand the cookies turned out fine, as did the conversations...) The candidate debate was presided over by Matt Bai and some other lesser known folks... So far, carla at Loaded Orygun (now on The Hankster sidebar) wins MVP for the debate section today [people seem to think that Obama was charming... that's nice....]

Someone said this at Group News Blog: "This is really interesting convention, the attendees are very diverse in age, not so much in race, but they do cross income boundaries to some degree...." Well, that's good news....

Marc Ambinder at Atlantic wins the award for Most Improved Player with this comment: "Barack Obama has placed on a pox on both houses of Congress and both political parties...." and "After the forum ended, reporters clustered around Clinton's spokesman, Howard Wolfson...." I don't know, I was talking to independents about Clintonism and how triangualtion hasn't particularly been good for regular people...

On a side note, John Harwood was allowed to say (now that the WSJ has been bought by Rupert Murdoch....) that "Some 53% back the idea of building a third party to mount presidential candidacy...."

The Seminal was really excited because he got a question in on the special session and he's having a party.....

Wait a minute! What's become of me??? I've become THEM! Yikes! I'm blogging about bloggers! Help me!... Oh, that's right... I'm going away to the Newport Folk Festival tomorrow. Thanks!

See you here next week!

Conversations on Independence

Let's talk about some of the psychological/cultural issues of the day. Ish has many good points in Three Scenarios posted on The Seminal, commenting on The Forgotten Reality in Reality-Based Politics by Kagro X on The Daily Kos--Ish's premise:

"Many in the Democratic base feel trapped between a party elite that has all but betrayed them on the one hand, and on the other a gaping political void whose depths they are reluctant to explore...."

Outlining 3 scenarios, 2 likely, and one that many independents are beginning to wish for, Ish goes on:

"The bind that Kagro X and many other Democrats find themselves in is real: the Elite doesn’t care if they are unhappy. The only way to make them listen, it may turn out, will be to vote for someone else en masse."

But, Ish says, grassroots Dems and Dem elites alike are afraid to move left....

Well put! At what point does someone decide to get out of an abusive marriage? Is what's "out there" more scary than staying put and putting up with continued abuse? Will your sister let you come live with her? Is there a knight on a white horse coming to take you out of there?

Fred Newman talks about independents and movement building this way this week in Talk/Talk "Apocalypse Now" :

"The fight going on is the people on the outside, whatever you want to call them – the people who are doing something new – to establish their group existence. It’s partly a psychological issue. In social therapy, we always talk to the group about building the group. But that’s very hard to do, because the individuated members are concerned with themselves, so creating a group is hard, even from the point of view of the people who are trying to build it. So, if you multiply that by millions, it’s hard to build a movement. The individuals – Perot, Bloomberg, whomever – who come and go for their own purposes aren’t going to build a movement. It’s got to come, somehow, from the millions of people “on the ground.” How do you acomplish that? How do you get independents to function as a mass movement? That’s very hard. And the Establishment is not going to give an inch on this. Not an inch. Independents are 40% of the electorate today. It could go up to 50%, 60%, 90%. It won’t make a difference...."

Can we build somewhere else to go? Can independent voters, who "swung" left and put the Dems in control of Congress in the midterm elections, join with grassroots Dems to lead America to a new place?