On Thursday, Kagro X posted here about the swearing-in of the new Congress. As he made clear then, he was far from the only blogger who attended some part of the day's events. I thought it would be nice to take a look around at some other blogger reporting on the day - because I want to draw out the feeling of celebration, because I want to celebrate the local bloggers who covered individual races, because this is one where on-the-scene reports from bloggers can give us something we don't remotely get from traditional media sources.
Connecticut bloggers had a strong showing. CT Blue is most focused on Joe Courtney, but has pictures from a few events. Connecticut Local Politics has a run-down of the whole day, focusing of course on the Connecticut delegation, and a hilarious post on the Lieberman party.
Finally, we had to go in search of the Senator. We found him, surrounded by well wishers and waited our turn to say hi. While we were waiting, we witnessed the following exchange:
Town DTC Chair: Hi Senator, I'm Town DTC Chair from Town and -
Joe Lieberman: [sour look] We got killed in Town. All is forgiven.
DTC: [semi-sarcastically] I forgive you too, Senator.
The sight of Senator Lieberman forgiving a town chair for working to elect the Democratic nominee (you know, doing his job) warmed my heart, so I was glad to see the town chair give it back to him a little and "forgive" him for running as a petitioning candidate.
He diaried it at Daily Kos, too, but PsiFighter37 wrote about (and has pictures of) Patrick Murphy's event at Progressive Wave's PA-08.
But when Patrick came back, there was a wild amount of cheering for him. He quickly thanked all of us for showing up, and he choked up a little from the sheer emotion of the moment. We had all worked as a team to get him to Congress, he said, and he planned on continuing to work with us as a team now that he was here. Slowly but surely, he began making his way through the crush of people who had been waiting to greet him and get their picture taken with him. There were so many people that the crowd had spilled over to the front of the office of Patrick's neighbor, Rep. John Larson (D CT-01).
MyDD has some video of Murphy, and of Howard Dean.
MyDD also covered the netroots party, which was the only event I was able to make it to. It was crazy of me to go to Washington just for one party, but it was worth it to get to experience even a tiny corner of a day like that. Friday before I left I stopped by Paul Hodes' office, to soak it in a little - PsiFighter and CT Blue posted pictures of the nameplates by the doors of Patrick Murphy and Joe Courtney's offices, and I too had that moment of just stopping and looking at that sign and grinning, because we did it, and now our long-shot candidates have their names outside offices in Cannon and Longworth; Paul Hodes and his staff have windows with a view of the Capitol dome. This is a thing to be celebrated not just on that one day, even as we turn our attention forward to the hard work of translating electoral victory into good policy.
Are there other on-the-scene reports we should read?
Update: In comments, Kagro X points to a number of other good reports. His comment here links like 15 different Politics TV interview clips. And Taylor Marsh has coverage here, here, and here (though some pictures she has captions for have evaporated I guess). And great coverage from 2 Political Junkies, a Pittsburgh blogger I'd never heard of and am glad to have gotten the chance to read - there was running commentary through the day but here are the permalinks to a few of the posts: an interview with Jason Altmire, observations on photo ops and on Keith Ellison, and some concluding thoughts. But reading his whole day of coverage is nice if you don't mind the scrolling.