Democratic Convention: Denver 2008 vs. Boston 2004

I’ve just arrived in Denver for the Democratic Convention. This will be my second convention and the two experiences couldn’t promise to be any more different.

In 2004, I road-tripped it to Boston along with the rest of the Music for America crew. We threw a show at the Middle East Downstairs attended by locals and delegates alike. It was a packed house and I think Ted Leo and the Pharmacists was the headliner. This was right around the time that the Future Soundtrack/Dictionary of America was launched and I think we were giving them away or selling them at the show. That was the extent of my “official” DNC 04 activities. The rest of the week we spent trying to scam our way into parties, and attending whatever events were free or public.

Among those events were a polling presentation by Celinda Lake on young voters (credit to Celinda, she’s understood this youth trend longer than most in professional politics), and some kind of MTV/Rock the Vote event at which a young guy who won an essay contest, gave a speech (and it was widely rumored that Andre 3000 was going to show up, but he never did). I attended a youth event on a boat featuring a variety of young candidates in which myself and the MFA crew (not at all dressed for success) stuck out like sore thumbs. We spent most of the time chilling with some of what are now the Advomatic and ActBlue crews, and showing people clips of our new Partisan Jab video: Dick Cheney’s Alive. And let's not forget road-tripping it down to Worcester to meet with the Downhill Battle kids to talk about how hacked, file-sharing xboxes were going to bring down the music industry. I actually heard Obama's now-famous speech on the radio while driving back to Boston from that meeting.

As an outsider, most of the organized youth events (that I could find out about/attend) seemed to be full of star-fuckers, and I thought they were thoroughly boring and mostly useless. Apparently there was a training offered by Democratic GAIN in conjunction with the College Democrats, but I missed that and have no basis by which to evaluate it.

The most interesting events that I did attend were a joint talk/workshop session lead by David Brock and Joe Trippi, and the DCCC’s “Blogger Bash.” Want to know how long ago that was in blog years? So long that no one knew who Atrios was, so the big joke at the Blogger Bash was that everyone walked around with name tags saying “I am Atrios.” The bloggers were exiled to a remote location across the river from the convention center, and you couldn’t really walk anywhere in Boston without running into some kind of crazy protest activity. I’d point you to the posts that I wrote at the time, but the Wayback Machine doesn’t seem to want to behave ever since the MFA site went down.

Fast forward to, well, today. I’m pretty much as far as you can get from being an outsider without actually being a delegate to the convention. Future Majority is one of the nationally credentialed blogs attending the convention. As such, I’ll have access to both the Pepsi Center and Invesco field all week long and I’ll be there when Obama delivers his acceptance speech. Not only will I be attending almost all of the youth events this week, I’m a member of the DNC Youth Council, which put most of those events together. I’ll be at press conference on Monday as a designated youth spokesperson, and I’m speaking on two different panels about the youth vote – once on Tuesday and again on Wednesday.

While I’m sure there will be protests galore (and I’ll try to snap a few pictures and check out the “free speech zones”), the big news on the activist side this year is the Big Tent – a veritable mini-conference happening right across the street from the convention. I expect that is where the action will really be, and where I’ll be spending most of my free time between panels and events. Fred gets it right in this New York Times article about bloggers at the conventions:

“I’m telling everyone to meet me at the Big Tent,” said Fred Gooltz, 30, an online strategist with Advomatic, a Web development and strategy firm. “That’s where I’ll be meeting everyone else who’s like me, folks that I’ve only met online or blogged and e-mailed with.” Mr. Gooltz sees the $100 fee as a bargain, especially since he would rather network “with movementarians, who see themselves as a progressive movement, separate from the Democratic Party hierarchy.”

Here’s what I’ll be looking out for this convention.

• How well attended are the youth events? Are we getting our message out to the press and the political class?
• Young people are 16% of the official participants at this convention – what are their days like? What are they accomplishing? What did they have to do to get to the convention and how could that process be made easier so more young people have the chance they do? I’d like to answer those questions.
• What’s the ratio of youth organizers to youth star-fuckers? How far do we need to go in convincing these young, super politically active folks (theoretically the low-hanging fruit) about the virtues of peer to peer organizing and learning how to effectively involve their social networks?
• Networking – meet those “movementarians” and get you out there who couldn’t be here in Denver the scoop about what is going on.
• Get a better sense as to how are the “cultural” groups like Rock the Vote, Music for Democracy, and HeadCount fitting into the picture.

In short – I’m hoping to take advantage of my new-found insider credentials to scope out what’s worthwhile and separate it from the bullshit. Best-case scenario, I’ll come away with a few ideas about what needs to happen in the next three months, and what needs to happen in the next four years. Seeing as I’m more on the inside now, I’m sure I’ve got a whole new set of biases that I didn’t have in 2004. In some cases, I think that will let me better contextualize some of the events that I (perhaps too critically) found worthless in ’04. In others, it may cause me to go easy on things that aren’t as good as they could/should be. I hope those of you out there who were with me back in 2004 will read my upcoming blog posts and keep me honest.