Today is the first day of Personal Democracy Forum, #pdf2008, and I am trying to make sense of my feelings about not being there. I don’t think it is sour grapes. I couldn’t justify paying the price of attending, and I just didn’t feel like scrambling to get in as a panelist, volunteer, scholarship, member of the press or so other sort of comp.

No, it feels to me like PDF has lost the personal touch. I spoke a little bit about that last year, and it feels even more so this year. It all feels so predictable, the usual speakers saying the usual things, various attendees complaining about panels led by four white men, and others being too crowded to get into.

Yes, I would have loved to hear Zephyr Teachout speak. I got a sense of what she was saying through Andy Carvin’s Tweets. It sounds like she still gets the personal aspect of it. I suspect that a discussion with her about her ideas in a coffee shop in Burlington would be great, but I suspect the hall at Lincoln Center was a less personal venue.

Yet from other tidbits I’ve picked up on Twitter, I wonder if the growing community of PDF is the growing community of those working, one way or another, in Internet Enabled Electioneering.

Micah Sifry started things off with a comment about how small donor networking has taken big-money politics down a notch. Has it? Sure, there are a lot of smaller donors fattening the campaigns’ coffers, but these coffers are larger than ever. On the spending side, politics is bigger money than ever. It would be interesting to know how much of this is going to media companies, both new and old.

So, what do we see at PDF this year? Wonderful maps of the influence of Internet based media. Presidential Watch 08 gives a map of the political blogosphere. All of the big name media companies are there. The campaigns are there. The DCCC and DNC are there, but what is missing is the long tail.

There was a brief discussion about MoveOn being on the fringe and Tracy Russo noted that this is one of the problems of web-only metrics. I suspect that if you look at the long tail of blogs by unknown and unidentified MoveOn supporters, you might see a very different picture.

The problem is that it is very hard to quantify the impact of these unknown and unidentified MoveOn supporters, and if you can’t quantify it, it doesn’t really matter, right? After all, what matters most is the quantified results of voting scheduled to take place in November, right?

Well, I think this reflects the myopic perspective of those who focus on electioneering to the exclusion of governance. How do you quantify Learned Hand’s criticism Oliver Wendell Holmes’ opinion of Schenck v United States and the effect that it the criticism had on subsequent First Amendment jurisprudence? How do you quantify the value of some unknown medical professionals who voluntarily provided an operation on James Lowe’s cleft pallet and its effect on the debate in health care in America?

All of this makes me think of this scene when a Cardinal was coming to Assisi in the moving about St. Francis entitled “Brother Sun, Sister Moon”. One of Francesco’s friends urges a mutual friend who has taken up with Francesco to come and speak to the Cardinal. The friend says that he doesn’t have anything to say to the Cardinal, but Francesco says, there are many that you could say, much of it centered around helping the poor. (Note, this is my vague recollection of the movie from many years ago and I may not have the details exact, I couldn’t easily verify them online, but it captures the idea.)

Perhaps this captures my ambivalence about going to PDF. On the one hand, I don’t feel like I have a lot to say to Arianna Huffington or Ana Marie Cox. I doubt they would listen anyway. On the other hand, perhaps Francesco is right. Perhaps we need to remind those focused on Internet Enabled Electioneering on the bigger picture.

Lets work on making our democracy, all aspects of it, a little more personal.