Today, I am attending DemocracyFest in Bedford, NH, just outside of Manchester. The morning started off with a breakfast where I ran into a lot of old friends. In breakfast room, the WiFi was fairly weak, so I could only get on briefly. However, this afternoon, I’ve found a room with good connectivity.

We had the standard round of opening comments, which included the reading of a proclamation by Gov. John Lynch about DemocracyFest. One of the phrases that jumped out at me was ‘Potluck Politics’, which sums up, fairly nicely what I like about Democracy for America and DemocracyFest.

We also had a rousing sing along by Jean Sara Rohe.

The first speaker was Jim Dean, talking about DFA. He made very comments like, “The highest office in this land is the office of citizen, but in order for this to work, we need to help people become more involved” and “show me someone who says their getting their information from the last two weeks of television ads in a campaign, and I’ll show you someone who isn’t voting”.

He talked about the 28,000 who registered to vote as Democrats in during the 2006 U.S. Senate primary. He then noted that Joe Courtney ended up winning by less than 100 votes. During the Q&A later on, someone asked about the 2008 Presidential Primary and Jim commented about how he thought a horserace was a good thing. It empowers and encourages voters. I think the Connecticut U.S. Senate primary was a good example of this. This was also further illustrated in a subsequent session by a couple people that had run for State Representative in New Hampshire. One of them commented about folks coming back to school in New Hampshire energized after having helped with primaries in Massachusetts or Connecticut.

Jim also told the story of Keith Crane, joining the local DTC, and getting Ed Meyer to run for State Senate. After Ed defeated the ranking Republican State Senator, he went on to be a key force in helping get campaign finance reform passed in Connecticut.

Jim talked a bit about the DFA Trainings that DFA does around the country. There was a question about whether or not these trainings were good for candidates, and Jim talked about the person who went on to become Mayor of Saratoga Springs deciding to run at a DFA training, as well as a DFA Training in Mississippi that included thirteen State Rep candidates.

There are DFA Trainings going on throughout DemocracyFest and this Jim’s comments provide a great backdrop for DemocracyFest.