{"id":28471,"date":"2012-06-11T07:38:54","date_gmt":"2012-06-11T12:38:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=28471"},"modified":"2012-06-11T07:38:54","modified_gmt":"2012-06-11T12:38:54","slug":"postcard-from-the-cantina-on-tatooine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=28471","title":{"rendered":"Postcard From The Cantina On Tatooine"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;Netroots Nation&#8221; was held, as it always is, in the midst of a throbbing Progressive success story. \u00a0This year, it was Providence, Rhode Island &#8211; a city that, lying as it does at the nexus of organized labor and organized crime, is the perfect metaphor for the &#8220;Netroots&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>It was held in downtown Minneapolis last year. \u00a0I spent some time people-watching in between events at &#8220;Right Online&#8221;, which (usually) follows Netroots around the country to show the world what people with jobs and lives look like.<\/p>\n<p>I shot this video of the Netroots crowd last year, at the 331 Bar in Minneapolis after the convo wrapped for the first day:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/35cLo7d07Xs\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>No, I&#8217;m a kidder. I kid.<\/p>\n<p>But this year, the kids at Netroots &#8211; who make the goth kids on <em>South Park <\/em>seem pretty chipper even in normal times&#8230;:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/V_V2oayrdgo\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>&#8230;look even sprightlier.<\/p>\n<p><a style=\"color: #1b8be0; font: normal normal normal 15px\/normal 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.625; text-decoration: none;\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalreview.com\/articles\/302328\/netroots-nation-under-cloud-john-fund#\">M John Fund apparently lost the annual <em>National Review<\/em> poker match, and drew the job of going to Providence to cover\u00a0<\/a>the event.<\/p>\n<p>Now, the Netroots kids weren&#8217;t particularly high on Obama last year. \u00a0It&#8217;s apparently gotten even worse:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>It wasn\u2019t only last Tuesday\u2019s jarring defeat of public-sector unions in Wisconsin, or President Obama\u2019s refusal to campaign in person against Governor Scott Walker \u2014 or unease that the Supreme Court may be only weeks away from sweeping much or all of Obamacare onto the ash heap of history. On Friday, in the middle of the conference, President Obama famously declared that \u201cthe private sector is doing fine,\u201d calling into question his campaign\u2019s basic competence in getting out a coherent message.<\/p>\n<p>Indeed, enthusiasm for Obama was decidedly absent from this year\u2019s gathering. Administration officials weren\u2019t invited to attend (Valerie Jarrett and others have appeared in the past), and President Obama limited his role to an unpublicized surprise video shown to delegates late on Saturday, when many people had already left. \u201cChange is hard, but we\u2019ve seen that it\u2019s possible, as long as you\u2019re willing to keep up that fight, I\u2019ll be right there with you,\u201d Obama offered. Not exactly a stirring call to arms, and the tepid applause his video garnered can\u2019t have pleased Team Obama.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>That&#8217;s the problem with personality-cult politics; if the personality doesn&#8217;t start either delivering on his promises or killing off all rivals, things go flat pretty fast.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;Netroots Nation&#8221; was held, as it always is, in the midst of a throbbing Progressive success story. \u00a0This year, it was Providence, Rhode Island &#8211; a city that, lying as it does at the nexus of organized labor and organized crime, is the perfect metaphor for the &#8220;Netroots&#8221;. It was held in downtown Minneapolis last [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lefty-alt-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28471"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28471\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28664,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28471\/revisions\/28664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}