Snark, at Yearly Kos

My friend Snark, from Random Acts of Snark has an excellent Yearly Kos update:

Some quick hits on YearlyKos –Thursday. The McCormick Convention Center is beautiful and massive. After being stuck in the extremely bland and windowless Riviera Convention space last year this is terrific. Even though I miss the card tables of Vegas. The McCormick is pretty isolated from “Chicago”. Not a lot of local atmosphere. That’s too bad. I’d like to get out and see the Art Institute but I’m not sure it’s gonna happen. Sen. Dick Durbin couldn’t make it last night to the keynote but he sent a very good videotaped speech from DC. He pushed all the right buttons. Keep the pressure on and make the Republicans keep voting on Iraq. Over and over. Let the public know who wants to bring the troops home. Certain TLC [The Left Coaster] commenters’ heads would have exploded. Howard Dean was great. As always. The man just knows how to give a speech. So natural. And he tells it like it is. He spoke at length about the fact that the Progressive movement is not about one or two election cycles and that it’s going to be our kids who will see the benefit of our actions not us. He spoke about the demographic trends of the young leaning Democratic since 2000. He didn’t call for “patience”. “Patience” can be a bad thing he said. We don’t need to be patient but we need to understand the reality of what it took the ‘Conservatives’ to do what they did to the country and that it’s not going to get fixed over a couple of election cycles. As example he commented that the Roberts Court has it’s origin not in the Bush administration but in the very early days of the Reagan administration. It was a great speech. Well received and he stood and spoke to people for a long time afterward. Hillary, Hillary, Hillary. The Presidential Leadership Forum isn’t until Saturday but already Hillary has lost some shine to many because of it. The PLF is going to consist of a group session with all the Dem candidates answering questions and will then break up into individual sessions with each candidate where they will answer questions individually. Upon arrival at the convention you needed to select one of these individual sessions to attend because they can’t accommodate everyone at each session and you got a color coded wrist band that you will need to wear to get in. By the time I signed in Obama’s session was full so I decided to choose between Hillary and Edwards. Fortunately, I chose Edwards. I say fortunately because last night, following the keynote event they announced that Hillary would attend the group session but that one of her senior staffers would be doing the individual session! Oh my! You should have heard the reaction in the ballroom. All the people who had chosen Hillary are now going to get some face time with….a Hillary staffer! Seriously unhappy people. Hillary lost a lot of fence sitters I think. At the Readers/Writers mixer afterwards there was coffee, some yummy desserts and some notables. John Dean, who will be signing his book Friday was there. Getting old but he looks good. Juan Cole was there. He’s got a new book about Napoleon’s adventures in the Middle East that’s only available at YK now. Chris Mooney was there. Many others. Friday morning we’ve got Gen. Wesley Clark. Always interesting and then it’s going to be tough to decide what sessions to attend for the day. More later.

In an e-mail, Snark wants to make clear: "Hillary didn't back out and that it was the Kos people that screwed up. I didn't know that when I posted."

UPDATE: Hillary made the "session" after all.