Hickey made sure there was no doubt about his group's attitude toward Nader: "We're determined that he get the smallest vote possible this time. Because he was a spoiler."
But does the presumptive Democratic nominee, Sen. John Kerry, really represent the progressive agenda?
"We're grown-ups," Hickey said. "I've got a whole agenda that Kerry is not talking about. But how do we get that agenda talked about within the political system? The first step is getting rid of Bush."
Some attendees aren't eager to embrace the Democratic candidate. Michael Smith, a 69-year-old retired peace officer from Santa Cruz County, Calif., and a longtime supporter of the Peace and Freedom Party (he'll vote for Leonard Peltier, who is in prison, convicted of the murder of an FBI agent), said he's been following the theory that the president knew about the 9/11 attacks before they happened -- the time, the place, everything. Look at the video of Bush reading to the kids that morning, he said. "He acted not surprised at all."
War and terror are on everyone's mind, but progressives typically focus on what Borosage calls kitchen table economics: jobs, wages, education, health care, retirement, the things parents talk about at the kitchen table after their kids have gone to bed.
MoveOn.org President Wes Boyd showed slides depicting the things that the group's members care about. Boyd spoke quietly, and the room took on a rather hushed tone. Each slide had one word on it, including:
Trust. Family. Freedom. Responsibility. Democracy.
He showed a slide with a word people are tired of: Me. He replaced it with a slide with the word We.
"They're tired of the Me culture. They're looking for the We."
And people understood, especially the Californians.
The biggest applause lines invariably involved Bush. Kerry rarely got mentioned. He's a presumption but not an preoccupation. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton dropped his name once, and got polite applause, but zero whoops and hollers. She got a louder response when she said electronic voting machines should include a paper trail.
Dean explicitly endorsed Kerry several times, each time to warm applause, but he incited a bigger jolt of emotion when he criticized Democrats for not standing up to the president (as did Julian Bond when he declared, "When one party is shameless, the other can't afford to be spineless").
Sen. Clinton showed up Thursday morning to talk about the 50-year project of conservatives to roll back the New Deal, all while ostensibly introducing the next speaker, billionaire George Soros. Clinton declared that "four more years of the Bush administration would leave our country unrecognizable." Soros was equally grave, if a bit more esoteric, assuring the crowd that the Bush Doctrine is a bubble about to burst.
There is an echo chamber quality to an event like this: At some point it's just a pep rally. But paralleling the speeches were training sessions on mobilizing support. The progressives don't want to make any missteps this time.
Dean reminded the crowd of the famous joke by Will Rogers: "I'm not a member of an organized political party. I'm a Democrat."
People chuckled, but Dean quickly added, "It's not funny now that we see what the consequences are."
