NN08 & CA-04 - The Class Act that is Charlie Brown
Mon Jul 21, 2008 at 03:50:30 PM PDT
Thursdays at the Netroots Nation are mostly dedicated to caucuses -- meetings of like-minded people to discuss their important issues. In an inspired bit of imagination, one of the meetings the convention establishes is the Lurkers Caucus for people who don't blog, but attend the convention. Clearly this is not a major advocacy group, but it's an opportunity for the people who are by nature or practice reticent to share with other people, rather than just sit back at panels and quietly listen.
While I am not a frequent diarist here, I am not quite a lurker, but last year at the Chicago YearlyKos, I could be fairly described as a lurker, and attended the Lurkers Caucus there. Really for no reason other than having enjoyed the last one, I attended the Lurkers Caucus in Austin as well.
The convention had neglected to dispatch a moderator for the caucus, and after a bit, I invoked an altered version of the old college Ten-Minute Rule and suggested that if the prof doesn't show up in ten minutes, the class is free to run the session themselves. So I essentially led the discussion and went around the room to get everyone to talk about themselves and explain their attraction to the Netroots and why they choose to lurk and not to blog, and we got a nice, free dialog going.
One of the people attending the caucus was Charlie Brown. He was there to do what a great many political candidates came to the convention to do -- speak to people, press the flesh, make them aware of his campaign and expand awareness. I was taking a seemingly arbitrary route around the room in calling on people to talk about themselves, and Charlie was one of the first people I called on.
Obviously there was a great interest in him, and there was a lively give and take between the attendants and The Colonel for about 15 minutes. He cheerfully answered questions and gave us all a good measure of him.
Now, there are a couple of things here that make this moment extraordinary to me. First of all, the odds were very slight that there were any people in this caucus who were from his home district. And this was the Lurkers Caucus, a group whose only unifying distinction is that they don't blog!! But here was Charlie, in a convention filled with bloggers, talking to the very people least likely to blog his appearance. (Yes, I'm blogging it now, but he didn't know I was going to be there...)
Secondly, after he spoke, we still had about 50 minutes of the caucus and we had resumed moving around the room, giving people opportunities to express themselves. Now, I know that Charlie was not there to share his lurking experiences. He was there to campaign. I fully expected him, and would not have blamed him in the least, to quietly slip out of the room in search of more campaigning opportunities at the convention. In fact, that's part of the reason I kind of steered the circuit of speakers to allow him to speak early. But Charlie stayed for the entire session, listening to people explain why they don't blog!
To me, this displayed the kind of grace and courtesy that we rarely see from politicians these days. There is such a strong push for politicans to stick to their agenda and not get sidetracked by anything that doesn't move them towards their goals. But Charlie sat there the entire time and listened carefully to all of the people in the room that he knew were the most unlikely people in all of the convention to benefit him politically.
He showed more to me by merely listening than he did from the words he expressed.
Let's get this guy in Congress!!!!
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