Reflections On Netroots Nation

If you were following the blog last week, you probably know that I attended the Netroots Nation conference in Pittsburgh last week. Netroots Nation is a conference for bloggers from the left side of the blogosphere with opportunities for training, networking, self-congratulating, and, of course, partying. Here are the previous posts: Day 1, Day 2 and Day 3. This is the third Netroots Nation conference I’ve attended – I attended in 2006, 2007 and 2009.

The first conference was notable because it was the “look at the freaks” conference (it was called Yearly Kos at the time). It was in Las Vegas and it was crawling with media who came just to see who these crazy pseudonymous bloggers were. The 2007 conference was the year the blogosphere went bigtime: the first Democratic presidential debate was held there (with 7 of 8 candidates attending). (Extra credit: who were the 8 Democratic presidential candidates in August 2007 and which one did not debate an Yearly Kos?) I would call 2009 “the year of Twitter” because Twitter really started transforming the experience. Several of the forums took questions by Twitter and it was extremely common to see a tableful of people ignoring each other and staring at their laptops and iPhones during speeches. Twitter made the experience feel quite personal, because you could follow what was happening in other panels in real time. It felt like you were there! (Search Twitter hashtag #nn09 to get a taste.)

Perhaps the biggest event was the keynote speech by President Bill Clinton on Thursday night. This was really a big deal, especially since the netroots and President Clinton didn’t always see eye-to-eye (especially during the primaries). His speech was partially a defense of his legacy and partially a call to action. He discussed how we’re at a generational power shift – and that’s why there is so much anger, fear and uncertainty. He defended his record of incrementalism, saying that it was the only choice he had at the time. He didn’t feel that there were people out there that had his back, and that he was abandoned on issues like DADT, DOMA and health care reform.

I attended sessions on the future without newspapers, local blogging, writing effective blog posts (I nicknamed it handholding 101), science denialism, the economy, opportunities for activism during the bill-writing process (Sausage-making 101), plus numerous speeches (Chuck Rocha, Darcy Burner and Howard Dean stand out) and special sessions – Obama aide Valerie Jarrett and the Specter-Sestak forum.

If I had to write a theme for this convention, I would call it the “fierce urgency of now.” Both opening speaker President Clinton and closing speaker Darcy Burner talked about keeping up the hard work and that electing politicians is only the beginning of our job. Our job never ends, now we have to keep pressure on elected officials to do the right thing. As we’ve seen, left to their own devices politicians tend to go the easy road and tend to listen to the moneyed interests, not necessarily their constituents. Darcy Burner even said it – we can’t just sit back and hope elected officials will do the right thing, we have to force them to do it.

I would say the netroots are at a crossroads – we need to switch to governing mode from election mode. I no some people have been disappointed that progress hasn’t happened as quick as they would like. So, we really have a decision to make – are we going to continue to engage in the system and try to improve it or are we just going to give up. I think both sides need to adjust: elected Democrats could be more bold and progressive and the progressive netroots could be more understanding and patient. We’ll have to wait to see what happens, I guess.