Eli Pariser from MoveOn spoke first and spoke about looking forward to the day that the conference is renamed, “Okay, we’ve taken back America, what do we do now?”

Andrea Batista Schlesigner of the Drum Major Institute responded by talking about Nature versus nurture and Voltaire. For the right, the growing gap between the rich and the poor is all about nature. Yet she goes on to suggest that we have a choice, public policy can make our nation fairer, or not. It is a choice, it is about nurture. After all, that’s the point of government, to create fairness.

She ties it to Voltaire and the phrase, “the best is the enemy of good”. Her dad suggests “The Good is the enemy of the best.” She ponders if we are really getting to the core questions. Are we holding corporations responsible? She observes that we don’t talk a lot about how much tort reform is being driven by corporations that don’t want to be held accountable.

This led to Rep. Keith Ellison, D-MN. He opened up saying, “We are a collection of leaders here today, and we need to talk business and how to organize the people. First of all, we’ve done the right thing, we’ve put the vision up on the wall. We can all talk about the vision. The vision is about everyone counts, everyone matters.”

From there he looked at how conservatives organized after 1964. He spoke about the being patient. He had a good response to a standard old conservative talking point about how government should be run like a business. “We all know what happens when you run government like a business, Enron, Worldcom…”

He then went on to talk about the need for unity in the progressive movement. “If you want to win, if you want universal health care, sustainable relationship with nature, peace, you need everyone.”

As to the role of congress, he talked a little bit about the importance of keeping pressure on congress. “Let me tell you, LBJ did not inspire Martin Luther King…. Don’t look to congress for inspiration to end the war… Politicians see the light when they feel the heat.”

Some final comments from Rep. Ellison included, “We have to find a way to resolve conflict internally. Whenever we have an antiwar march that is all white, we need to look around and say, ‘This is not what our family looks like.’”

The plenary ended up with Rep. Jan Schakowsky amplifying the insider/outsider aspect of how politics works. She pointed out that Nancy Pelosi is on our side. “No one wants to end the war in Iraq more than she does.”

She goes on to do a plug for the importance of the “Employee Free Choice Act”

As Rep. Ellison said, the opening plenary did the right thing, it “put the vision up on the wall”. All of the speakers spoke well with this unified vision.

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