First Day in Denver

by: hotflash

Mon Aug 25, 2008 at 22:58:12 PM CDT

At the Missouri caucus breakfast this morning, for example, I ran into Jim Ross, who works for Jill Schupp's campaign (she's trying to hold onto Sam Page's House seat, HD 82, for the Dems.) Jim tells me that she and her volunteers have already knocked on all 14,000 doors in the 82nd (well, except for gated community type situations) and are starting to go round for a second time. And it's looking good in that district. Her campaign ran a poll hat showed Obama and Nixon with double digit leads in that district and Jill herself with a "substantial lead".

Jim worked as well for Andria Simckes this year, and I talked to her as well, asking her what the future holds for her now that she's out of the treasurer's race. She had a broad smile when she told me that I haven't heard the last of her in Missouri politics, but for the nonce she's working as a surrogate speaker for "the team", meaning Nixon, Obama, Page, perhaps even Zweifel. And of course, the upside of losing that race is that she gets to reintroduce herself to her husband and small children. It's a treat having a personal life again.

Other nuggets I picked up this morning will be showing up in later postings as I have the time to write about them in some depth.

The bloggers' tent is mayhem. It is elbows next to elbows, the unrelenting hubbub of friendly bloggers, and some determined souls tuning it all out like white noise as they hunch over their laptops. I fled, for peace, to the panels. They were excellent.

If Bobby Kennedy can't light a fire under you about the climate change issue, then you're a corpse. When asked what we need to do in this country about the energy crisis, he spoke in favor of an open market instead of a rigged one, emphasizing that our current policies reward bad behavior and penalize good behavior.

An-n-d ... she's off!

by: hotflash

Sun Aug 24, 2008 at 10:02:19 AM CDT

It's OK with me, though, that I won't be on the convention floor. If I were, I could listen to the same speeches you can hear on TV. What I'll do instead is have breakfast each day with the members of the Missouri caucus at their hotel, see what sort of insights and news I can pick up there. Then I'll go to the Big Tent, a two story tent that's been erected three blocks from the Pepsi Center, which is where the convention is being held. The Big Tent literally is a tent, but an exceptionally strong one, with AC.

The Big Tent is for bloggers, and I think that's where it'll be happenin'. Bloggers do more than cover the stories. They're coming to wield some power by shaping opinions, and because of that they are part of the story. We've been told that members of the traditional media will be coming to the tent to cover that aspect of the campaign.

Not that I figure I wield much more influence than a minnow in Lake Erie, but you take a few thousand of us minnows, feed us regularly, and we start to have some heft.