Friday, July 18, 2008
Meeting and greeting at NN
It would be absurd to try to list the Kossacks I’ve run into here in Austin. Some I’d had interactions with two years ago at YearlyKos 1 in Las Vegas, others I’d missed back then. As always in matters such as this, there’s sometimes a disconnect between one’s mental picture of the person behind the persona and the reality of that person. Some are older than you’d expected, some younger. On some occasions, even the gender is unexpected. On the other hand, there are those whose true identity matches what is displayed through the words and pixels are placed on a computer display.
It’s not really predictable which ones do jibe and which don’t, so I don’t think there’s much of a lesson to be drawn from this thought. In any case, match or not match, it’s fascinating to meet the people you’ve been communicating with over the years.
I do wonder, of course, how those Kossacks who recognize/acknowledge my username might compare their impressions of me to their prior pixel-based impressions. Not that I could actually ask them about that. Way back when, more than a few Kossacks assumed that I was female, probably because of my gender-free username.
Aside from the Kossacks, there are also candidates and (semi)celebrities all around us. I had coffee and danish this morning with Oregon Senate candidate Jeff Merkley. Yesterday, while I was breakfasting and chatting with mcjoan, Idaho Senate contender Larry LaRocco stopped by to join us. I must note that Larry wasn’t coming in to talk to me; in addition to her connections as a dKos frontpager, Joan has deep, deep roots in Idaho and in its Democratic Party politics.
Last night, at the reception sponsored by the Texas Democrats, Burnt Orange Report, Texas Senatorial candidate Rick Noriega, and others, our neighbor in WA-08 Darcy Burner was pretty much a rock star. It certainly helped that she was wearing the same <⁄war> t-shirt she had on when the Burner’s house burned down a few weeks ago. She and NPI have been handing out cool little buttons displaying the same “code” on the same gray t-shirt-colored background. I’m wearing mine proudly.
Other impressive candidates/electeds/luminaries we’ve been seeing here and there—TX-25 Congressman Lloyd Doggett, California Secretary of State Debra Bowen, former Alabama governor Don Siegelman, DLC chair Harold Ford, Jr., Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle, New Mexico House candidates Martin Heinrich and Ben Ray Lujan, Connecticut House candidate Jim Himes (if he beats Chris Shays, New England could have an entirely Democratic House delegation). There are any number of others, at the federal level and in the states, but I don’t want to belabor the point.
As I finish this episode, Ford and Markos are on stage in a back-and-forth about the way to focus the Democratic Party into the future. There appears to actually be a modicum of agreement between them, at least until we coalesce to get Barack Obama into the White House. We’ll see what happens if (I want to say when, but such optimism scares me) we do win in November.
