This is being simul-posted at the exact same time on SquareState.net and DailyKos, because all politics is local and all local politics are national, and nowhere was that as readily on display as at tonight's Drinking Liberally in Denver where we raised a glass with Daily Kos front page writer, McJoan.
It seemed that every person in the room served a strangely dual role on both the local and national levels. We were just a group of local progressives, but the Mountain West seems to be enjoying a rare moment of relevance, and something is coming together politically in Denver right now that feels the way a town with a good music scene or flowering art movement must feel. I have been places where the pendulum of politics swung incrementally through the center, and certainly many area politicians are advocating for exactly that, but it was not the mood of this night. This was a creative movement that sought change on its own, very western, terms.
It was a cluster of average people, but they were all fearlessly willing to take the lead in crafting their own futures, and in that way their stories are worth telling to a wider audience.
Mason Tvert: the Politics of Pot
With a name like his, you can be pretty sure that most of the 15,800 Google hits on his name are about the same guy. He is the Executive Director of SAFER, a pro-legalization organization that may just have handed his cause one of its most significant American victories. After a 2005 ballot initiative had passed in Denver to legalize adult possession of small quantities of marijuana, Denver's Mayor John Hickenlooper discarded the result, saying that the city police had no choice but to enforce the law of higher jurisdictions. In the years that followed the vote, marijuana arrests increased.
"I made personal choices when I was younger that I neither support nor condone for others and certainly wouldn't encourage through public policy"
~Mayor John Hickenlooper, Denver Post
Mason and his group went back out and returned to the ballot with Initiated Question 100, a measure that set adult marijuana consumption in private as the lowest priority for investigation, arrest and prosecution, and created a marijuana policy review board to assess the implementation and results of the ordinance. Last week, the initiative became law, 56%-44%.
A tax issue spear headed by the Mayor, in a well funded campaign without organized opposition did slightly worse than Mason did on a tiny fraction of the budget.
The panel will be appointed by the end of the year, and the new rule says that SAFER gets to name two of the members, with the others coming from law enforcement, defense and prosecution lawyers, drug treatment professionals, and other affected professionals. I knew that Mason would be one of the two picks from SAFER, but who would the other be? Mason laughed and said because there was no provision for turning the job down, he was considering forcing the Mayor to participate.
Pam Bennett: Council Candidate at Large
Last week in Aurora, an eastern suburb of Denver with more than 300,000 residents, Pam Bennett finished just out of the money in her race for City Council. There were two at-large seats being contested, and she got 21% of the vote compared to the 26% and 25% of the winners.
This result was suprising to many who thought such a narrow margin would be out of her reach. It is not often, or ever for that matter, that an openly transgendered candidate does so well in a major election. It makes one wonder how hard people would have worked, and how much more willing they would have been to donate, if they had known that she was such a viable candidate and the Republican incumbent on such weak ground. Prior to facing Pam, he was on the short list of possible challengers for the local Congressional seat.
He better start fighting if he even wants to hold the one he has. Pam told me tonight that she is keeping her website and rolling her campaign into an immediate exploratory committee for the next round. With something like 160 precincts to walk, the first round was the introduction and ice-breaker. The probable light turn-out of the 2009 elections means that she has a remarkably good chance of finding the 2100 voters she would need to add to win the job. Her main challenge might just be keeping the field clear of other Democrats now that she has crashed open the door.
Pacified: Blog Midwife
Blogging would not be the same without Pacified.
Calitics. Blue Jersey. Blue Mass. Burnt Orange Report. Docudharma. ColoradoPols. Raising Kaine. My left Nutmeg... the list of blogs on the Soapblox network include over a hundred of the top names. Pacified wrote and maintains the software that makes community blogging happen, and if you live in a state with a vibrant netroots, it is certain that on some level you owe him more than he is charging.
On election night this year, he had 235,426 page views. He and I were talking shortly before the 2006 election and he was praying that Kos had his servers in good shape, because if the national netroots went down all of that traffic was going to run straight through Soapblox. How many people are going to hit on a Presidential year?
We have all been witness to the amazing growth of the local netroots, but Pacified has lived it, measured it, and has had to keep it flowing even when his day job has made some fairly massive demands on his time. Even seeing him at Drinking Liberally has become a rare thing, but I am always glad when he shows. I owe him a deep personal debt. When he offered me the front page of SquareState, it put the tools in my hands that I needed to build what has been one of the most fulfilling parts of my life. It gave me the platform and access I needed to be able to make my contribution to the world.
Am I imagining it, or might Karl Rove been at least subconsciously influenced by Pacified's work when he said this last week?
"People in the past who have been on the nutty fringe of political life, who were more or less voiceless, have now been given an inexpensive and easily accessible soapbox, a blog."
Johne: Big Things Come from Small Donors
Some people have strange hobbies. Johne's is changing the political world. Being an early adopter has not been the best way to cash in, but he at least gets to be there on the ground floor, and the rest of us, if we are wise, will pay attention to where he is going. Yes he was at YearlyKos, and yes he was there the year before that, and yes he was heading up a Drinking Liberally chapter when I was still in sports bars, and yes he was even at SquareState a full 70 users before I was, but it isn't just that he was there early on, after all, Colorado is a community that includes people like Luis, Frankenoid, Jeralyn and others, it is the type of moments he has chosen to be a part of along the way that has been interesting.
His participation at SquareState marked the transition between the great national communities and the advent of the integrated local netroots. Back when the others were writing their great solo blogs and great national blogs, he was participating in the scale of local blog communities that would come to represent the future of state legislative political impact. SquareState has always been smaller than the more established ColoradoPols, but in order to keep from becoming irrelevant Pols had to abandon its old top down style and adopt the registered users and promotable diary format. It had to let in the community, or the community would have gone elsewhere.
Luis was around back when blogs were brought to your door on ponies, and I myself had a personal fiefdom on the web. Both Luis and I gave it up and came over to join Johne, because he was where the scale of operations was right. He instinctively knew that it was not just about viewpoint, it was about community.
Drinking Liberally was the same way. Getting the blogs offline was a key step, and he grew a chapter, and then a chain of chapters, until Colorado has more per capita than any State in the Union. We have had Markos, Jeffery Feldman, David Sirota, a slew of members of Congress, and countless candidates as our guests. When Drinking Liberally grew to where a national meeting was in order, they had it here in Denver. Quite a hobby.
Johne just dotted the i and crossed all four t's on the next phase, the 'Square State Small Donor Committee'. I am ready to predict that the dimension that State blogs added to the national scene will be expanded yet again, as State blog fundraising joins its national counterparts. I know this because Johne is doing it, and that man lives in the future.
TakeBackTheHouse: Boots -> Blogs -> Ballots
My days have been incredibly cool since I joined the staff of Democrats Work. This month I have worked on food drives, tree plantings, and making holiday packages for the troops overseas. Last month it was covering graffiti, soccer camps for urban youth, and cleaning open space.
And then I get home from these things and I type and type. I blog about the work and I try to inspire people to join. I draft letters to be sent out to the volunteers handling the damage of the Southern California fires and Northern California oil spills. I find the photos needed to thank our corps in Georgia and to brighten our invitations to the crew in Nevada. I send messages to bloggers around the country asking for their help spreading the word where we have projects. I write and mingle and try to remain a chatty evangelical lobbyist who is a local fixture anywhere it might help let people know what we are building.
It wasn't my vision; this politics of service that asks Democrats to put their ideals into action. That was the work of Jason Carter and Thomas Bates, who with the guidance of Jimmy Carter, Wes Clark, Max Cleland, Gary Hart and the rest of the Board, set out to build what is becoming the Democratic Party's community work wing.
It is not my leadership. Erin Egan directs the Colorado office, and somehow juggles raising twins with organizing the growing tower of projects we take on.
I was hired to put on boots, grab a shovel, and tell the story. But the truth is that I have become the story in an entirely different way. I have become the proof of the concept. Politics used to be what I thought about and talked about, but now it is that and more. Politics is what I do. I don't run for office, I clean parks. That is my politics. Public service means something vividly real, and when I am out there in my Democrats Work t-shirt, tending a trail, and someone stops their bike beside me and thanks me for the work our crew has been doing, I know that our actions are outweighing all the promises in Washington. I know that if this is how all campaigns were waged we would win every election, or better still we might even get some people to pitch in and join us in the work that needs to be done.
Joe Miklosi: Being the Change
Our's are all stories of an average local circle whose projects are somehow growing beyond us and are having national impacts. Miklosi is a different creature. He is already a national impact settling into a newer, more personal role. As the Director of the Colorado Democratic State House Caucus, he helped foster the revolution in Western politics that writers like Markos have since tried to explain. Then later, as Colorado Director of Progressive Majority, he was a key part of every campaign that inspired Colorado Democrats to win without triangulation. While others were saying the only way to win in the close districts was to closely resemble your opponent, he was mentor to the candidates who won by doing the math, walking the precincts, knocking the doors, and explaining to the voters why they held the positions that they passionately held.
Progressive Majority coached leaders. Caucus Chair Rep. Morgan Carroll, House Whip Rep. Andy Kerr, and dozens of others won by going on record as supporting the progressive causes even in districts where the registration numbers scared others into the capitulating center. Miklosi's mark on the State and national stages will continue to grow as the candidates he assisted continue their climbs into higher and higher leadership.
And then Joe turned the tables on himself.
Progressive Majority still is doing its work, but it is carried in Colorado by other hands now. Joe the technician has taken on the challenge of being Joe the candidate. He is engaged in a contested race for the State House where he is far from being the only progressive, and his race is anything but certain. He told me once that it was a very different experience being the one on the ballot than being the adviser.
As we talked about how he felt it would be possible to implement universal health care on a State level, I thought that while making this first step into office might be a delicate one, if he pulls it off it won't be long before his national voice is heard again.
Joan McCarter: Daily, and I mean every freakin' daily, Kos.
Idaho blogger, McJoan is working on a book about Western Politics, but I don't fault her for it. She has neither the quiet defensiveness, nor the alternate stagy arrogant flamboyance I associate with writers.
I am certain they are too familiar with one another to accept the comparison, but really she reminds me of nobody in the blog world quite as much as Markos Moulitsas. They are both intelligent and informed without needing to be the only light in the room. In my brief experience of him, Markos has more kinetic energy to him and certainly makes more points a minute with more emphasis on more topics, but I stand by the comparison nonetheless. They share the unexpected accessibility of people who can prove their points without seeming desperate to prove their points.
McJoan has made the step into the Meta. She is a provider of the news, and she does that well, but you can see in her posts a tug of introspection. A recent story of her's began, "The netroots as a movement is still a work in progress. But it seems that we're on the right track, because we're sure getting the right enemies."
That is the Meta; Blogging about the nature of blogging. That again is something she shares with Kos, but it is shared by others as well, like EmDash, and well... myself. We all believe that there is something really happening here, something that is bigger than spin and messaging.
Yesterday at the Democratic Convention meeting, DNCC CEO Leah Daughtry promised that the bloggers would cover the convention in new and ground breaking ways. If that happens it is going to be something other than just more words from more new journalists getting in to cover the same old show. It is going to come from the stories that have nothing to do with the speeches or the Clintons. It is going to happen somewhere in the Meta. It is going to come from people who see the system surrounding the circus.
And Joan is going to write it.