convention

cross posted on the CDNY blog: http://collegedemsny.com/blog/...

Today the College Democrats of New York executive board and members of the St. Johns executive board met on the St. Johns Manhattan campus in NYC to discuss planning the 2009 CDNY Convention. Details about the itinerary were discussed including who to invite as guest speakers, where to hold events, what to do about entertainment, registration and check-in, hotel accommodations, and much more. For 4 straight hours, we debated and discussed everything about planning the convention. This will definitely be the Biggest & Best CDNY Convention Ever so make sure you attend this year! The Convention will take place from April 17-19.

We are planning on having a ton of speakers at our convention including state senators, Congressman, Assemblyman, and hopefully (fingers crossed), we can get Senator Schumer and Governor Paterson to be our keynote speakers. More details about our convention will be posted on our blog (link above).

cross posted on College Dems of NY blog: http://www.collegedemsny.com/blog

After 2 exhausting hours of debate and discussion, the College Democrats of NY (CDNY) executive board voted by a majority vote for the St. Johns College Democrats to host the 2009 CDNY annual convention.

4 Schools had submitted application bids to host the convention included: Binghamton, Albany, and Stony brook, in addition to St. Johns.

With a state federation of 45 chapters, these 4 application bids were from 4 of the strongest chapters in the state, making debate longer and harder as the pros and cons of each school were discussed.

In the end St. Johns won the majority of votes to host the 2009 convention. The decision was largely based on the desire to host the convention downstate in NYC this upcoming year since last year it was held upstate at Cornell University. St. Johns has also consistently been one of the strongest chapters in the College Democrats of NY state federation and this past election season worked extremely hard at mobilizing students to help on state senate campaigns and travel to battleground states for Obama.

The convention is customarily held starting Friday evening through Sunday afternoon. The convention will be held sometime in March or April.

This coming year, an estimated 150-200 students are expected in attendance in the largest convention gathering for CDNY ever. Featured speakers, panels, and discussions will be taking place on the St. Johns campus in Manhattan.

This year we are aiming to have featured speakers like Governor Patterson and Senator Schumer as well as several state senators and Congressmen. Last year Congressman Dan Maffei and Eric Massa spoke at the convention as well as state senate candidate Don Barber.

More details about events and speakers will be coming soon.

What's more fun than watching an inspirational speaker deliver soaring oratory as he historically accepts his party's nomination?

Doing so with drink in hand, of course.

So sip if he says "hope" -- really when he says it -- and enjoy the other rules below to share a celebratory toast as you drink liberally tonight.

Take a Sip when
He Says:
- hope
- change
- community organizer
- Bush
- Hillary Clinton
or when:
- he says how much he loves America
- he tells a joke that actually makes you laugh
- he implicitly/explicitly compares himself to MLK
- compliments Michelle for being accomplished

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.

The Nebraska Democratic Party held their convention this weekend to select individuals for the Democratic National Convention in Denver. There was of course official business such as selecting language for the platform of issues the Nebraska Democrats stand for as well as electing officers for the next two years on the convention agenda.

But the real reason the turnout was at a record high of 800 attendees at the state convention was because this was the moment where Nebraska Democrats were electing the individuals to represent our state in Denver.

For many it was a disappointing weekend in the sense that over 800 individuals were in attendance, over 400 wanted to go to Denver, but there were only 25 spots available (plus 4 alternate spots). This is of course, in addition to the now infamous 6 Superdelegates that were already assigned to party officers and leaders.

In total, Nebraska is sending 31 delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Denver with 4 alternates (these are the people clearly hoping someone can’t make the trip to Denver so they can fill their shoes on the floor of the convention hall).

The question many young people had at the state convention was just how many young people under the age of 35 will actually get to go to Denver?

Find out the answer at: think.mtv.com/janeflemingkleeb