It was the second YearlyKos, and the last. Surprise, surprise. About two thousand people heard it from the lips of the founder Saturday evening and stopped breathing for a second – Wait a minute! We’re having the best time of our progressive lives at this convention of bloggers/netroots activists, and never again?
The Kos of Daily and YearlyKos, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, was giving the closing keynote address to the meeting, and he laid the news out in the first words of his speech. A feeling of drama rose and then was resolved in the next sentence: The name will change. Next year it will be the Netroots Nation Convention.
This may not help the wider world comprehend what’s going on. New language, my friends. New actors. Remember, this is life out here, political life mixed in with technological life, and all aspects of it are changing. Last year at the first YearlyKos in
You may still be trying to figure out what
Netroots is some combination of the Internet and grassroots, and there’s a big component of activism in true netroots. In
“… we’re activists. We don’t do silence. …
“I’m given a great deal of credit for our movement’s success. But let’s be brutally honest – what I’ve done is... build a website.
“Let me say that again – my chief accomplishment the past five years has been building a website.
“I simply provided a safe haven for progressives to meet ... and then a beautiful thing happened.
“Without my planning or prodding, You started organizing.
“You started talking to each other and deciding, on your own, to take charge of your politics.
“You began a conversation about the direction of our country. …
“You decided that it was no longer enough to watch a 30-second political ad, or simply to hit the polls on Election Day.
“You realized that our nation wasn’t going to fix itself. We couldn’t depend on our Democratic Party to save us.
“The media was AWOL.
“We shared a common disgust at the irrelevance of our once proud party and its allied organizations. …”
“Then technology changed everything.
“Whether it was blogs, or podcasting, or social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, or MoveOn, or YouTube, people quickly adopted myriad communication technologies emerging from the web and turned them to political purposes.
“Millions did so.
“And while individually we were still nobodies, together, we became ... somebody. A very important somebody.
“And that makes some people very uncomfortable.
“Like David Broder. Joe Klein Robert Novak. Bill O’Reilly
“Echoing what so many of his colleagues think, Bill Kristol on Fox News was outraged that anyone would take us seriously. He called me a “left-wing blogger who was not respectable three or four years ago.’
“And he was right. In their world, I wasn’t ‘respectable.’ None of us were. …
“As our good friend Atrios likes to say, We weren’t "very serious people."
“You see, we weren’t stupid and gullible enough to fall for the administration’s lies on
“Those ‘respectable’ people couldn’t stop praising Bush for being "bold," and "resolute".
“They fueled what has now become the biggest foreign policy debacle in American history. …
“They said us crazy bloggers were pushing the party to the left, and that our increasing influence would doom Democrats to electoral defeat in 2006 and beyond.
“David Brooks in The NY Times wrote in 2005 that thanks to bloggers – those rabid flying venomous sheep - Democrats would be sure to carry just
“Many Democrats nodded along in agreement.
Did we listen? No. …
“Of course we’re not going to listen.
“We learned to tune out the likes of David Broder and Joe Klein years ago. But what’s amazing is that we’re no longer alone.
While we were once lonely voices on the outside, people on the inside have discovered that we’re not so scary after all, that they don’t need to fear us.
“We’ll get our hands dirty. We’ll deliver results. And they’ve learned that, quite frankly,
We tend to have a habit of actually being right about things.”
“Still, there’s a lot more to this movement than being right. The hallmark of this movement is the leaders it generates.
“It’s a movement that continuously refreshes itself, taking advantage of its democratizing infrastructure to give anyone with the right idea and passion a chance to change the world.
“It’s a world in which the gatekeepers in the traditional media, political and activist establishments can be easily bypassed.
“It doesn’t matter whether the elite think we are respectable or not. They have no right to judge us.
“It is those leaders – YOU -- who are changing your country.
“Me? I’m just a guy who built a website.
“Just a year ago, we were a freakish curiosity. I stood before you at the first YearlyKos conference and declared that we had arrived.
“People snickered and mocked me. Those reporters at the back of the room. They were laughing at me. They were laughing at us.
“But then Ned Lamont kicked Joe Lieberman out of the Democratic Party.
“And how about people-powered Jon Tester and Jim Webb?
“We helped recruit them into the race, helped them win tough primary races, and pushed them over the finish line.
“It was fitting that their early-morning razor-thin victories – those victories that the netroots fueled -- gave Democrats control of the Senate.
“In the House, dozens of candidates with strong netroots support won their races, others came shockingly close.
“In Massachussetts, the people-powered movement helped elect the state’s first African American governor, Deval Patrick.
“And suddenly, we were no longer a curiosity. We are effective.
“We delivered victories that were born of our passionate political conversations.
“And now?
“We are a full-fledged partner in the progressive coalition.
We have gathered here in my hometown,
but with our allies in the labor movement, our friends in the issue groups, and our party leadership. …
“Earlier today, we had a conversation with the next president of the
“Like any movement, we are maturing. We threw stones, got people’s attention, and
perhaps a bit surprisingly, they listened.
“That early hostility – based on substantive differences – is now giving way to new respect and trust.
None of us in this new coalition – the netroots activists, the issue groups, the party officials – None of us can win on our own. And we don’t need to. We have each other.
“And yet, seeing all that we’ve accomplished, I still can’t believe that this all started with a bunch of frustrated progressives hacking away at computer keyboards.
“I’m often asked if I knew what I was doing when I first started Daily Kos.
“Of course not. I’m not that smart. This was never my intent. It wasn’t some brilliant master plan.
“I had no idea that our country was full of natural leaders, all looking for a way to get involved.
“I simply built a website. It was you who built the netroots.
“And together all of us will build a true progressive
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