Wampum

The Problem with Kos

by Nick Bourbaki

A Convention of Convenience

YearlyKos, the annual blogger convention bearing Markos' name, was another example of reality bumping up against rhetoric. In Crashing the Gate, Kos bemoans such events -- or, at least, when he's not running them:

If you want to see the problem up close, all you have to do is put a bunch of progressives together in the same room.

In April 2005,we had a chance to see just that, when a hundred progressive leaders descended on Monterey, California, including such movement luminaries as syndicated columnist Arianna Huffington; Kim Grady, president of the National Organization for Women; Maggie Fox, the deputy director of the Sierra Club; Wes Boyd and Joan Blades of MoveOn; Chellie Pingree, president of Common Cause; and Deborah Rappaport. The organizers from the Center for a New American Dream hoped to extract lessons from the 2004 election debacle while finding ways for progressives to move forward. It was a worthy effort, and one that offered rare networking opportunities between progressive leaders.

But it was also Exhibit A in the "Why Democrats Will Never Win" file. It was a prime example of a divided party, a split movement.

The conference was full of the silly group-building exercises that seem to infect all such gatherings.

If that was Exhibit A, let me present Exhibit B: YearlyKos, held only one year after Kos attended the CNAD convention. Not only did YearlyKos include speeches and panel discussions by the very same people attending the other event (Huffington, MoveOn, etc.), but it included an entire eight-hour day to single-issue "caucuses," including an LGBT caucus, African American caucus, Latino caucus, and Science Bloggers caucus (I'm not kidding). Other workshops included quite a lot of "group building" exercises, focused on bloggers for sure, but group-building nonetheless: "Recruiting progressive Candidates," "Down Ballot Online Organizing," "Turning Online Activism to Tangible Offline Action," "Religion Roundtable." Whether or not YearlyKos workshops were as "silly" as the CNAD are alleged to have been is up for personal debate; but you get the picture.

In the ultimate display of sucking up to a crippled Democratic Party, YearlyKos' closing speaker was none other than the DLC's Harry Reid, the same Senate Minority Leader who recently shut down a filibuster by progressive Democratic Senator Ron Wyden over unnecessary subsidies to oil companies. How did YearlyKos market Reid? By calling him "Give 'em Hell Harry."

In Kos' mind, Hell is a place with sofas and free wine coolers, I suppose.

What YearlyKos did accomplish is simple: Democratic candidates learned that blogs can be used to generate buzz and money. Bloggers learned that Democrats will come and talk to them. What the convention did not accomplish is also worth noting. Despite bluster to the contrary, the communication at the convention was largely unidirectional: candidates talking to bloggers. Bloggers weren't affecting Democrat's positions. Bloggers weren't changing hearts and minds towards progressive policies. Bloggers, like labor unions and minority groups and everyone else, were simply being pandered to.

Starstruck, these amateur journalists were happy to be in that position, too.