Over at TAP. One of them excerpts:
"I haven't seen an agenda this exciting since my last League of Cities meeting," said Ed Kilgore as we walked to … well, I can't quite remember which of the YearlyKos's dozens of panels we were walking to. It could've been Friday's examination of telecommunications policy. It could've been the panel on trade theory in a globalized economy, or the one on the relative virtues of single-payer health care systems and multi-payer structures, or the one on electoral reform.
This is the great secret of the netroots: For barbarians, they sure are boring. The loudest boos of the conference came when Bill Richardson proposed that we amend the constitution to mandate a balanced budget. As The Politico's Ben Smith wrote, it had to be "the first fiscal policy booing on record." This is a crowd that truly believes in the importance of counter-cyclical spending.
I don't point this out to poke fun at the netroots. Wonkery does my heart good. But the intense focus on the innards of public policy actually gives a more accurate impression of the netroots' true nature than the usual examination of some blog commenter's curse words. The netroots are disproportionately rich, educated, and technologically adept -- they are, in demographic terms, technocrats. And technocrats don't crash gates. They write memos. They are far more comfortable improving from the inside than agitating from without. Which is why the media's habit of painting the netroots as some sort of emergent special interest, with these conventions acting as their trade meeting, has always been a bit off, but never more so than now.
