Throughout the convention, I tried to keep the posts (wherever they were appearing) to the substance of the convention--i.e. what do the Netroots think about the world. There's a meta-question, though, that an analysis of substance can't answer: What does YearlyKos say about the Netroots?
Which is to ask, How big are they? How much must they still grow? How much power do they wield? Etc. My thoughts here.
There are literally dozens of observations a casual participant could have taken away from the YearlyKos convention, which ended Sunday in Chicago. Lots of people, mostly friends, lots of space, not a lot of free coffee, plenty of fireworks, but more moments of boredom.
The free food was revolting; the food for sale was either expensive Hyatt food or required a cab ride into the city. Some panels were fascinating; most were not. Howard Dean's speech brought the crowd to its feet only moments after it had chatted loudly through Dick Durbin's appearance by videotape.
The presidential candidate forum - the touchstone event of the conference - was at different points illuminating, predictable, light-hearted and deadly serious. The candidate breakout sessions afterwards were, by contrast, mostly disappointing.
In short, YearlyKos was what you'd expect at a convention of participants in a political movement that's still in its adolescence - not exactly new, but still not fully mature; fairly large, but not yet the biggest driver on the left of either the media or Democratic politics; impressively organised in some ways, yet still struggling with the tensions that underlie a group of people with one big goal but many different, sometimes conflicting, smaller ones. To quote the regrettable Britney Spears, the netroots is not a girl, not yet a woman.
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