Trying to Take Back America

I'm just back from Washington, DC, where the Campaign for America's Future staged its fourth annual Take Back America conference at the "Hinckley Hilton" near DuPont Circle. Bringing together close to 2,000 of the country's most dedicated progressive activists and strategists for a series of speeches, conversations, panels, workshops and parties, TBA showcased a raft of innovative policy proposals, initiatives and projects. Also on hand to make speeches was much of the Democratic Party leadership, including Senators Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Barack Obama, Russell Feingold and House Minority leader Nancy Pelosi.

Unfortunately, the story out of the conference, according to most media accounts, was the division in the progressive community, demonstrated by the booing Senator Clinton received as she defended her opposition to a timetable for withdrawing US troops from Iraq. I was at the speech. Though she did get static on Iraq, the general response to her talk was overwhelmingly positive. She garnered five enthusiastic ovations by my count, and by the end of her speech--mere minutes after she supposedly alienated the crowd--she left to a standing ovation much, much, much louder than the earlier booing.

Now I'm not saying that the positive reaction was necessarily a good thing. My feeling was that she was able to win a legitimately progressive crowd over far too easily with hollow progressive rhetoric. (And this isn't a call for heckling either. I think it's worth listening to people with whom you disagree. You just don't have to cheer them madly!) But people's reactions are complicated. My only point is that I didn't leave the conference feeling the story was "the widespread disagreement among left Democrats," as a particularly egregious piece in the New York Sun reported yesterday, and as the Washington Post and New York Times have echoed in dispatches this week.

I thought the story was the remarkable set of new ideas being passionately detailed by a klatch of determined activists of varied political stripes. The energetic and intelligent remarks of Robert Biko Baker in the opening plenary had me checking my laptop for info on his organization, the National Hip-Hop Political Convention. Baker's group is working to develop a political agenda and an organizational infrastructure for the hip-hop generation. The NHHPC's broad goal is to increase civic and community involvement among young adults between the ages of 16 and 35. Its national convention takes place in Chicago from July 20 to 23.

cont'd...

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/actnow?bid=4&pid=92283