Takeback The American Dream Conference Day 1

It was a most inspiring first day of the Takeback The American Dream Conference. One of the first speakers to the at large conference was Progressive Congresswoman Donna Edwards. She spoke eloquently about what America should be and express much of what we all know; there has been class warfare effected on the working middle class for the last 30 years.

Later on Van Jones gave the most inspiring speech of the morning. He reiterated much of what he said at the Netroots Nation 2011 conference. The most salient point he proved was that the real American Patriots are the Liberals and Progressives, After all the policies we support are policies that make all Americans stronger and with that America stronger. The other side claim patriotism at the same time they support policies that export our jobs, give corporations power over people, stifle democracy by wanting to control every aspect of our social lives, and simply disregard policies that promote the American working middle class.

Later in the day I attended I attended the breakout session “Without Vision The People Will Perish: What Do We Believe, and How Do We Talk About it”. It was chaired by Author Drew Westen of Westen Strategies LLC, and Celinda Lake of Lake Research Partners. The basic tenet of the session was that most Americans support the values and policies by a large majority of Liberals and Progressives. Unfortunately we have allowed the Right to distort our message as they mislead about the negative effects of their own values and policies. They provided insight on how we should tailor our message to reach the entire American population.

I read Drew Westen’s book The Political Brain which taught me a lot of how configuring a message differently can have a more effective impact. After the session we spoke about many of the concepts in his book.

We ended the day with a well attended happy hour where I met several of the Liberal talkers on TV including guys like Adam Green and a few others.