A good time was had by all

Tuesday night St. Louis area Kossacks 'met-up' for some good food and drink and lots of good conversation.  As many as 30 people came and went during the 3+ hour gathering.  We sat outside on the patio at the Royale, a St. Louis neighborhood tavern that frequently plays host to liberal activists. The weather was spectacular and we stayed a long time.

We were lucky to have Duckhunter, Maryb2004, Clarkent and his colleague from  Show Me Progress, Hotflash.  ChingChongChinaman, famous for his Saturday Night Losers Club series, spent the evening with us.  Archpundit gave us the scoop on some Illinois races.  And before this starts to look like a celebrity gossip column, let me tell you about some of our other guests.

Activists from Young Democrats and staffers from some local Democratic officials and candidates joined us.  Two local organizers from Drinking Liberally were in attendance.  And the Chairman of St. Louis' City Democratic Central Committee, Brian Wahby, came and spent almost 3 hours talking with bloggers.  

Wahby has served as Chairman of the party for 4 years or so.  In that time, he has activated what had become a pretty tired organization.  That is not to say that Democrats weren't doing well in St. Louis City.  In fact, they were winning with spectacular margins.  But they weren't winning with the kinds of numbers that are possible.  Wahby started working immediately to change that. The mission of increasing the margins in St. Louis City is very important because Missouri's rural counties are heavily Republican.  For Democrats to win state-wide, the margins in St. Louis and Kansas City must be very large.  

In 2004, Wahby opened a large central headquarters and ran phone and door-knocking operations, often with hundreds of volunteers.  He reinvigorated the Young Democrats and was able to pull people from Washington University and St. Louis University into the campaigns.  And he raised money to fund the operations.  Overall, we were not successful here in 2004 but many believe (including me) that is largely attributable to the fact that Kerry abruptly pulled his operation out of Missouri 4 weeks before Election Day, dealing a fatal blow to a fledgling field organization.

Consistent with efforts to update a stagnant organization, Wahby came to last night's Meet-Up to ask questions and listen.  "How does the Party get better by using blogs?  Do blogs render the geographically-based organization of today's Party obsolete?"  As you can imagine, the discussion that followed was lively and long.  Shockingly, there was some disagreement between participants.  But the important take-away for me was that the conversation was taking place and that last night undoubtedly marked the start of a conversation, not the end of one.

So enough about the Democratic party, back onto the Kossack party.  The important thing I haven't said was 'It was fun!'.   The people who came are intelligent, interested, active and fun.  While there is some weariness resulting from the Bush ordeals that we continue to endure, I also sensed that this will be a hard-working, door-knocking, fund-raising, neighbor-to-neighbor-talking group of campaigners next year.  And from what I saw, they are definitely up for the task.