Netroots Nation At Home finished up Saturday evening. It was a herculean effort to replicate the annual conference experience by Zoom. Highlights are here. You will see a lot of familiar, progressive faces. But without seeing, networking, and drinking with my political family and making new friends, it felt a bit hollow. It was not like being in Denver (where it was scheduled until the plague hit) and coming home exhausted and energized to fight another year.
Our local Democratic committee held a 2-hr Zoom briefing Saturday morning on preparations for the fall election. Everything we normally do must be reconfigured to cope with the coronavirus. The thoroughness and scope of the preparations was impressive, representing a helluva lot of time and planning done largely face-to-face in normal times.
The local Board of Elections is working furiously on its preparations as well.
Don’t take it personally, I told an activist who had set up a voter registration table in her apartment building but found few takers. Normal people pay little attention to elections before Labor Day. We are not normal people.
With the billions raised and spent every four years on presidential campaigns, normal people think that kind of cash is always floating around “the party.” It’s not. Normal people are stunned to learn that the county team on that Zoom call and the 40-or-so people on it are all volunteers. When are they going to pay you? my mother asks regularly. Who they? Most local committees have very limited resources. “The party” isn’t a sugar daddy with the deep pockets, as people believe. And the national party has nothing to do with county committees anyway.
There was another national organizer call over the weekend. There have been a lot of those Zoom meetings and coordination calls this summer. None of it is on TV. Hundreds of activists are on calls like these: union organizers, health care activists, party activists, elected officials. Some paid. Many not. Some you’ve heard of. Many you’ll never hear of. Clicktivists who jump on Facebook or Twitter once or twice a day to badmouth “The Democrats” for their slackness and lack of progressive chops see none of it because they don’t see it on TV or online.
With few exceptions — the women, typically — national-level Democrats never seem aggressive enough. Yeah, some officials’ positions are less progressive than progressives’ aspirations. And some perpetually cringeworthy leaders seem from another era:
But that leads critics to believe there is nothing happening. Progressive Twitter lit up at the end of last week demanding to know why Democrats were not doing more to push back against the sabotage of the USPS. Then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced Sunday night she plans to call the House back into session. Be assured, that planning was happening behind the scenes before it popped up on TV and the Internet.
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