"Get This Party Started" authors blogging at DFA weekly. Two so far.

[madfloridian]

Get This Party Started features articles by various activists and a forward by Howard Dean. I have not read it, but I am keeping track of the bloggers at DFA.

Tonight's live blog was by David Kusnet, about his chapter in the book.

http://www.blogforamerica.com/archives/007643.html

Get This Party Started: Speaking "American"

How can progressives present our causes and candidates in ways that make sense to most Americans, especially the great majority whose living standards have been flat-lining under President Bush.

We can communicate and organize effectively on the local and state levels in efforts like the campaigns for living-wage ordinances. But, on the national level, with the great exception of Bill Clinton and, all-too-briefly, Howard Dean and John Edwards, our candidates and leaders have too often been timid and tongue-tied.

I've had the opportunity to see and hear how we've gotten some things right and other things wrong. I worked full-time in union organizing from 1975 through 1984 and have worked with unions and public interest groups since then. While labor has been taking a beating, union organizers have developed some persuasive appeals, such as "Make work pay."

On the other hand, I was a speechwriter for Walter Mondale in 1984 and Michael Dukakis in 1988—good, decent candidates but not great communicators. I tried to distill the lessons of those campaigns in a book, Speaking American, that Clinton and his campaign staff read, and was chief speechwriter for him from 1992 through 1994, which was like trying to get Miles Davis to stick to the sheet-music. I saw Clinton do many things progressives liked and a few things we didn't like. But, undeniably, he is the Great Communicator of America's Center-Left in our times.

And last week was Chris Bowers of MyDD. Here is his live blogging.

http://www.blogforamerica.com/archives/007614.html

Get This Party Started: Blogging For Political Change

Now before I go into my answers to these questions, I want to note that one of the things I have learned from my experiences as a blogger and my new experience in being published in print is that compared to the world of the blogosphere, the world of book publishing moves very, very slowly. Rarely, if ever, have I written something on MyDD that I fully expected to stand up without any need of revision for a period of ten months. While I am proud of the work I produce on MyDD, I also like to think of blogging as a way to record my thoughts as they develop and change, rather than as something that will be recorded in posterity. This is not even to mention the fact that the netroots and the blogosphere is an extremely new phenomenon, and the general parameters for discussing the nature of the blogosphere have not been very well developed. Given all of this, it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that many of the ideas I wrote about last May have undergone a decent amount of revision in my own mind. However, since the main purpose of this book is to start a conversation among people on how we can all push for a more progressive America, I don't think this is a problem. These ideas are open for discussion, not written in stone.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0742540375/102-5116435-1387365?v=glance&n=283155