Yesterday,
All America PAC attended the New Democrat Network's
Annual Meeting. Many insightful things were said - which we blogged about
here and
here and
here.
What was striking about the various panel discussions was the almost unanimous agreement with one of the central theses of "Crashing The Gate". Namely, that Washington in general and Washington-based consultants in particular are obstacles to needed reform. Here's a synopsis of Joe Trippi's comments on this subject (as posted by our liveblogger):
People and consultants who are used to doing things the old way. They are concerned with who is going to give them their 15% for sending out an email or coming up with a wireless cell phone ad. They also don't know how to use a lot of these tools and they don't understand what these new technologies are capable of.
Most of them are also from a generation that is used to having an older mentor. We aren't used to having 19 year old mentors, but thats what we need to do, we need to go out there and learn from our young people.
This is the first generation that has the ability to create their own media and communications vehicles for their candidates using google or youtube.com.
What we can do is to help develop these tools and the real thing that you have to do is trust these young people and get these consulting people out of the way--which is very hard to do.
Check out the All America PAC blog today for more on Day 2 of the conference.