Our trip to D.C. hit critical mass after just one day and I didn't have a chance to diary as we went. I've been back home for a week and it doesn't seem to be slowing down, so I'm going to bull my way through and report on the happenings.
We had many interesting adventures, and one of those was hunting up Darcy Burner, which proved to be very fun on many levels.
Capitol Hill is full of what are called Federal Style homes; sturdy brick constructions with cute little front yards. Here's a rather famous example - 133 C Street, home of The Family.
Just around the corner from this den of iniquity, not far from the Cannon House Building on the way, one can find Darcy Burner's domain - the Progressive Congress office. We puzzled for a while over how to actually get inside, annoying some of the other tenants in the process as we fiddled with the intercom system.
Once inside we climbed and climbed clear to the top, where we found Darcy and her scheduler, Sara.
Sara and Beth, both having been campaign schedulers, immediately began speaking some inscrutable derivative of English, all the while giving Darcy and I the evil eye. We talked, back and forth across the office, drive time and appearance overruns, national security and online organizing, until Darcy's time ran out. The conversation was just getting interesting, so I got to walk her to her appointment in the Rayburn building, a ten minute hike from her office.
While in the office I'd received a clutch of stapled handouts describing the ProgressiveCongress mission. There is treasure here for Progressives frustrated by the ever expanding space of the blogosphere; if we just show up and start working it appears the House Progressive Caucus will be willing consumers of our efforts, but what those efforts are could be a bit different than what DailyKos might expect.
Working. Not just blogging. This is something I've been making noise about for the last three years and taking forceful action on for the last nine months. The blogosphere is good in that anyone with a little bit of writing talent, say a partially disabled Iowa farm boy, can turn up and cut out a chunk of the discussion space for himself. But it's bad in that the meritocracy is entirely based on writing skills. Talented managers of people and processes are looking on, puzzling over how to put a stop to the infighting and get people moving.
Some of the things we've done in the background ought to mesh nicely with a Capitol Hill based interface to the House Progressive caucus. We've been producing a flow of diaries for Progressive candidates as we provide various social media services to such campaigns. Our thinking, our methods, and in some cases our software and people are spreading to issues Progressive will support as well.
Most notable of these are the fact that we're helping facilitate the (non-partisan) Union of the Unemployed's effort to garner support for a jobs bill and both Spedwybabs and I have been invited to join the (pointedly non-partisan) Coffee Party National Team. Beth is working on the upcoming national convention, while I'm busy sharing some of the tools, techniques, and the team the Blog Workers Industrial Union has put together over the last nine months.
Recognize what is happening here, members of the 250,000 strong DailyKos community. There are about 120,000 people involved in Union of the Unemployed and Coffee Party now has 212,000 members with bi-monthly meetings happening in about 400 locations nationally. DailyKos long ago reached saturation, while these other two organizations are 50% larger and each is less than six months old. Given the right moves what is now less than 600,000 people will bloom into a network larger than Glenn Beck's audience. And none of them are passive consumers - they'll all be reading, writing, attending meetings, and organizing to better both themselves and to serve our nation in a time of great change.
Neither of these new organizations, being non-partisan, would lay claim to Progressive principles, but both are happily taking advantage of the help offered by the little Blog Workers Industrial Union. Their issues are very often in line with those of the Progressive blogosphere and the maturity and reach of our social media operation can not help but lead to a mutually beneficial sharing of resources and reinforcement of message with an operation like Progressive Congress.
It's hard to say where all of this is headed. I certainly don't see a Progressive Party emerging and engaging in the same sort of civil war with Democrats that the Teaparty is conducting with great success against the Republicans. The Coffee Party is instantly taken to be an opponent of the Tea Party, but look carefully at their guiding principle: civility. They're not a hazard to the Tea Party, but given the size and trajectory I think a certain irresponsible fake news outlet is in for a nasty surprise as the movement replaces mass media spin with a brand of local, deliberative democracy our grandparents would easily recognize.
Having cleaned up in D.C. I'm now hearing rumbles of The Great Skulk being Georgia bound. You'll have to put your nose on the ground to figure out why Athens is so important to us. Reach deeper than the symbolism, although it's quite appropriate that a reinvigoration of American democracy should involve a stop in a city that shares its name with the home of the first cause of western democracy, Athens, Greece.
If you meet us on the road, well, we'll have some fun together making CHANGE happen, but if our paths never cross that's no excuse for not doing a little skulking of your own - both of these other efforts have easy to use means of finding local groups or, if they're not already present, simply starting one of your own. I strongly suggest you do both, then come back here and amplify the news of what you find.