Drunk and Exhausted but Critically Acclaimed and Respected

I'm back from Yearly Kos. Sorry we had no content for a few days. I thought maybe I had something arranged for Sunday but that didn't pan out, and it was impossible to post from the conference itself.

This was my first time at the conference having missed Vegas last year. My impressions:

• Yearly Kos is white.
• Average age = 35+.

From what I hear, this year was actually an improvement over last year (on both counts), which is slightly disturbing. I've talked at length about the lack of overlap between the new progressive youth movement and the netroots, which both developed at the same time. This was evident in Chicago this weekend in the aggregate, although there were a decent amount of smart young folk running around. Campus Progress and Young People For both put in a good showing. I met numerous Student PIRG folk, a couple Young Dems and a number of Future Majority readers (great to meet y'all, btw), and the Obama student team was ably represented at the conference by James Hannaway, who I was fortunate enough to be on a panel with (Technology and Politics: The Next Generation).

All in all, it was a fantastic experience. There could have been more young folks - particularly of color - but it's a well known criticism of the conference, and maybe we'll do better next year when the conference will be less about Daily Kos and more about the Netroots. A lot of immigration blogs and blogs by people of color are starting to pick up steam, getting organized, and increase their presence in the netroots. Hopefully they will push for greater representation next year, and I'd like to see a contingent of young people of color "crash the Yearly Kos gates" as well.

I got there a day late, so I missed most of the panels I wanted to see, and my Friday was packed with three panels - Framing from the Top, Building the Progressive Youth Movement, and Technology and Politics: The Next Generation. Needles to say, all I did on Friday was run around prepping and presenting - not a lot of spare time to see what others had to say.

All in all, it went well. At the framing panel people seemed to respond to my statements about the need to think less abstractly about framing and more about the nuts and bolts of consensus building and practical application (even though I was less than articulate on this point) and even more so to my suggestion that Millennials are believers in the power of government and ready to ditch Bush's conception of the Unitary Executive if progressives just started to articulate a competing vision. The technology panel was fun as we hashed out the emerging software, hardware, and user trends that might change politics and technology in 2012. I knew three of the panelists already, and with a lot of audience participation, it was a great bull session on where we're going with this poli-tech thing.

The youth panel had me most nervous as I was the moderator and the session got picked by C-SPAN as one of ten panels to be recorded and rebroadcasted.

It was decently attended as folks trickled in throughout, and I think it went down really well. In particular I was thrilled with Matt Singer's presentation about how youth politics lost the cool factor, and the challenges facing new organizations. Adam Connor spoke about my favorite new topic - the netroots/youth movement divide, and Alexis McGill gave us a rundown on the challenges in reaching communities of color and pulling them into electoral politics. Ivan Frishberg also gave a brief history of the youth vote, and Shauna Thomas discussed developing new progressive leaders. I had hoped to have some time to follow-up on the presentations - particularly those by Alexis and Adam - but we ran over on time and I opted to go directly to the audience Q&A.

We've gotten decent reviews on the Young People For and Campus Progress blogs. And lots of folks told me they thought it was a good panel, afterwards. As soon as the C-SPAN video is available I will post it. I have no idea if I'm going to be the organizer for this panel again next year, but I'd love to hear thoughts on how it could be better from anyone who attended.

Most of the time the best parts of these conferences are the people you meet and the networking/socializing time you have together. This year was no different, and, for a bunch of political nerds, we had some pretty decent parties/antics. The Living Liberally folks threw a party in their hotel room (after an ordeal in which they had to tip the hotel $500 $100 under the table for a "corking fee" on $400 worth of alcohol). Like college, they actually ended up sneaking beer into the hotel in the convention tote bags - very freshman year of college.

Even after bribing the employees to look the other way, the hotel promptly kicked us all out of the room less than two hours later, and we decamped to the patio outside. Apparently it's cool for us to get sauced on their doorstep, but not in the privacy of our own rooms. There was a weird incident in which - as we were herded to the elevators - an older women implored the hotel security and conventioneers to "not blame John Edwards (for the party being broken up)." I don't get it, but it made for a good joke for the rest of the night. Eventually I ended up in a midnight poker game with a bunch of folks, where I did well enough to not be embarrassed, yet poorly enough that I was disappointed with myself. Alex has pictures on our Flickr account.

I missed out on the candidate forum the next day (which you can view in its entirety online) because I ditched the conference to go to the second day of Lollapalooza for some much needed rest (and time away from politics). I promptly ignored my decision to avoid politics, and tried to see what type of activism was going on at Lollapalooza. The festival organizers approached MFA about doing something in 2004, but it never panned out. I was hoping to find that they'd partnered with folks to bring some progressive messages to the crowd - particularly after listening to Matt's presentation about recapturing Cool in politics. What I found was pretty disappointing. The only thing I could find was "Green Street." Basically a little alley of tents off to the side offering fair-trade and green merchandise, coupled with a few "educational" banners. Like everywhere else, they basically shunted the dirty hippies aside so they could hock Play Station games to the crowd and sell overpriced beer and pizza. Lame.

The concert was great - if further exhausting. My liver now needs a vacation from my vacation. It was good seeing old and new colleagues at the convention - which is getting basically good reviews in the press - and even better to cap off the weekend with a show by my new favorite band, who summed the weekend up perfectly with a quote from their latest album:

Drunk and exhausted but critically acclaimed and respected.