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The crowd gathered for the "Online Messaging: What Works and What Doesn't Fly Online" workshop had been split into groups to compose an Action Alert based on the lessons Jeff Lucas and Dean Nielsen of Progressive Majority had just imparted. A few examples: "Personalization is key." "It's really important to pick a fight." "It's always good to have an enemy." "There's something to be said for fear." And most improbably, considering the convention host: "It's fairly difficult to go too far online."

There's something deliciously ironic about these two guys unabashedly talking in public the way the left always warns us Karl Rove does in private. At any rate, our charge was to stir up protest via email against a Washington State school district's decision to place a moratorium on the screening of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth in the classroom. The Kossacks tore into the assignment with relish. "Do You Support Banning Books?" the subject line of one potential email read, comparing An Inconvenient Truth to Huckleberry Finn and Catcher in the Rye. "School Board Pollutes Classroom With Censorship!" screamed another headline. "Stop the Attack on Critical Thinking in Our Schools!"

Then there was the content. "Every day in my classroom 30 students sit down and expect to hear the truth, but now the school board is telling me I cannot provide it to them," a young lady read aloud to the groups. "....We cannot allow the next generation to be denied their basic right to education!"

Which begs the question: Can the DailyKos crowd writ large actually believe partisan-to-the-core Al Gore is the only choice for educating our children? I'm sure some evangelical parents would like The Silent Scream shown in every biology class in America as well, which would probably have Kossacks begging Buddhist monks to self-immolate on the Capitol steps. What's good for the liberal goose isn't good for the conservative gander in this corner of the political world. Such are the hypocrisies sanctioned when one is convinced he and his friends are humanity's saviors.

MANY KOSSACKS NOW seem to be asking, as Robert Redford's Bill McKay pondered at the end of The Candidate, "What do we do now?" At the "Holding Congress Accountable for a Progressive Agenda," one confused soul asked, "If we're going to hold Congress accountable to a progressive agenda, how do we define progressive?"

"At this point it's 180 degrees from what we've had the last six years," panelist Pam Spaulding answered.

"That's pretty broad," someone in the audience shot back.

"Yeah, it is pretty broad," Spaulding admitted. "There are all kinds of issues. Um...living wage, health care, getting out of Iraq...energy, the environment. Just about anything that has been put on hold, stomped on...I mean, saving our Constitution. Just the basics at this point."

The tough thing about narrowing things down is an expectation of more immediate results to follow. To my biased mind, Spaulding's list still sounded mostly formless and squishy -- the kind of list any politician could claim partial victory on, because almost any minor thing his ilk does can be shoehorned into such broad categories. Of course, I'm not the target audience. Unfortunately for the Democrats, the target audience seems to be having trouble buying it, too -- at least for now.

topics:
Education, Health Care, Business, Environment, Books, Constitution, Iraq, Energy