What happens in Vegas

by: Rosi Efthim

Fri Jul 23, 2010 at 04:28:42 PM EDT

Hello from beautiful, baked Las Vegas and Netroots Nation!

Yesterday was a wash in terms of getting anything out the door. There are 2,000 bloggers and politicians here at the swanky Rio Las Vegas Hotel & Casino, but yesterday so much pull on the bandwidth that it crashed the internet here ... for hours.

Everybody here is working on strengthening the progressive movement. It's a buzzy place.

The first big session of the day yesterday was Primaries Matter: Reclaiming the Democratic Party. Bill Halter the big draw; his narrow loss in the Arkansas Senate Primary last month to incumbent Blanche Lincoln was the kind of galvanizing opportunity that drew in activists from all over the country, showing up to buttress the drive for change of the locals on the ground. Redefining what the Dems are all about via the choice of a forward-thinker over a moderate.

Halter was great, giving credit for making his campaign viable quickly. He outlined how roots groups massed - superquick - to make his run viable. He declared March 1. By end of day March 2, he'd raised $1 million on the strength of asks made by DFA, PCCC & MoveOn. Later, field staff and organizers materialized from all over the country.  

And the drivers of Halter's soar were the rest of the panel - Arshad Hasan who runs DFA, Adam Green (PCCC), Ilyse Hogue (MoveOn), Markos Moulitsas of DailyKos, and the CM for Elaine Marshall's Senate .

Adam, who used to be the Communications Director of the NJDSC, talked about how progressives were viewed by the Party as rabblerousers, clueless complainers who didn't realize how much their desire to shift the party progressive was going to cost Democratic seats (a theme echoed in Washington Post's coverage of the session.

That got big laughs. The room was packed with people who make things happen for candidates the infrastructural party ignores, or opposes. They're primarying candidates who deserve challenge. The mother of all is Ned Lamont's meteoric (winning) primary challenge to Joe Lieberman, which gave courage to the entire class of 2006 Dem congressional candidates to come out against the Iraq War.

Halter said the only thing he'd have done differently in his race was getting in earlier - he had only a 77-day window (but lost by only 3 points). Halter's campaign had the life, the drive, viable $$ (credit netroots) - he was the stronger candidate. (Our old friend Steve Kornacki does a great job explaining why the wrong candidate won this race - at salon.com)But Lincoln's had the power of incumbency, the infrastructural party (which should have been with Halter, if it was smart) and Bill Clinton who used his considerable powers for her. On this, Adam Green was definitive:

It's tough to see someone you've believed in betray you in a big way. We need to pick our heroes. . . . I think it would be sad if we went through this entire conference without calling out Bill Clinton for what he did.

More later. Met up with Adam L aka clammyc this morning, and we're hitting up sessions and meetings.