Yes, I'm coming to Las Vegas for YearlyKos partly so I can see what you all look like. But there's more to it than that.
Sometimes people really do look like their stereotype, by the way. Last year I visited a political science class at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro to talk with the students about social security. A right wing group heard that I was going to be there and crashed the class. Most of the crashers stuck to their talking points favoring the Bush proposal, but one of the most vocal of the crashers just couldn't help himself and spoke against Social Security altogether. He said that if the students wanted to help pay for their own parents' or grandparents' retirement that was their business, but it was none of government's business.
The guy could have been separated at birth from the character in Animal House who rode his motorcycle in the door and up the stairs of the Delta House, and then played the William Tell Overture by thumping his throat. He fit perfectly my stereotype of a right wing nutcase.
There are certainly stereotypes about the progressive blogosphere. But when people mention to me that they've read my diaries at DKos, they've seemed, well, normal.
I first started posting here about ten months ago, but I lurked before that. I lurked to figure out who all the new people were who had flooded the Democratic Party in the last election, and whether they would save the Democratic Party or be the death of it.
I've never seen anything like the 2004 election for new people coming into politics.
Well, actually, I have, but my perspective was different. Another misconceived war also brought a lot of people into politics. Those folks have gone on to become leaders of the Democratic Party--party officers and elected officials, including members of Congress from all over, even the South.
The relationship between the new guard and the old was not always harmonious then. Some of the old guard welcomed the new folks, and others did not. Some of the new guard were respectful in their disagreements with the old guard, and others were not. Many of the old guard were wrong about Vietnam, but they had gotten some other things right, like the New Deal and the labor movement, which together largely created the middle class, and the civil rights movement.
Most of the new folks in the 2004 election worked first in the Dean campaign, of course, but many wanted to help in other Democratic campaigns, including mine. I was glad to have their help.
Others assumed that anyone who had been involved in politics before the 2004 election was necessarily tainted. They didn't know me, they didn't know anything about me, but any member of Congress was almost certainly a calculating careerist. When I met them, they took the opportunity to Speak Truth To Power! They, of course, got to be the Truth speaker, and I had to play the role of Power. That is not as much fun for me as you might imagine. In fact, it gets kind of tedious.
When I began visiting DKos, I found a little of everything. Some views I found hideous. I generally stayed out of the pie fights, but I was furious last July when I wrote this, one of 756 comments to a diary entitled "The Bigotry of the Left":
"The term `red neck' is a class slur, by the way. It refers to Southern whites who worked stooped over in the sun. I don't like ignorant bigots, but I come from the Southern white working class.
"A word about Southern Baptists. My mother's parents both died by the time she was four. She was raised in the Baptist orphanage in Thomasville, North Carolina. My mother depended on the generosity of Southern Baptists, a generosity born of their faith."
But I found other views to be pretty smart, even wise, views pragmatic in pursuit of a decent set of principles. That's what I want to be when I grow up.
I'm absolutely convinced that people who now inhabit DKos will be the leaders of the Democratic Party in the very near future. Yes, if you stick around, you will soon become the establishment. You will probably have to endure a future generation of newbies who insist that you play Power so they can Speak Truth to Power!
But there are rewards. I was elected to the North Carolina House of Representatives in 1992. There was a peculiar alignment of the planets in 1993 and the North Carolina legislature enacted one of the first safe gun storage laws in the country. As chairman of a subcommittee on school safety, kind of a leadership with training wheels job, I wrote the new law. That year there were 74 juvenile gun deaths in North Carolina. In 2002, the last year for which I have seen statistics, there were 32.
Now, can you explain to me again the virtue of having remained disdainfully aloof from politics?
My assigned role at YearlyKos is every politician's dream: I get to decry the problem while others suggest solutions. The panel is on the impact of the Bush economic policy on American workers and their families. It is a topic that I've written about here and that I've addressed in testimony before the House Budget Committee, and it was what I talked about when I gave the Democratic Response to one of the President's weekly radio addresses two years ago. I could link you to death, but you get the idea.
Economics may be the dismal science, but there is nothing dry about it to me. I can close my eyes and see the faces of the people who are the statistics. I represent workers who have lost their jobs or are stuck in jobs with stagnant wages while their health care and energy costs skyrocket.
Others on the panel are:
* Hale Stewart, a former bond trader and now a lawyer in Houston who writes here under the nom de blog of Bonddad;
* LondonYank, who turns out to be a cute, petite blond chick named Kathleen Tyson-Quah, who is the founder and CEO of Granularity, a company whose business I'm sure she understands even if I don't;
* Stirling Newberry, who frequently blogs on economics issues here under the name Stirling Newberry, and who is a Fortune 500 consultant specializing in telecommunications and East Asia; and
* Linda Beale, a law professor who has blogged as well as written in academic journals on tax policy, and who is struggling admirably to overcome having attended Duke in her youth.
I will also just hang around and listen to some of the other panel discussions.
If you feel the need to speak Truth to me, the panel on economic policies is the time to do it. If you see me having a beer in the bar, I'm taking a break from being Power. Why don't you take a break from Truth speaking and have a beer with me?