Clinton and the Bloggers

CHICAGO - We’re at the second annual YearlyKos convention, where liberal bloggers have convened with excitement that almost all the Democratic presidential candidates are courting them in person on Saturday.

This was quite the coup, since a year ago at the first Kos convention, only one current Democratic presidential candidate, Bill Richardson, showed up. (Former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, Gen. Wesley K. Clark, and Gov. Tom Vilsack — who were considered potential 2008 Democratic candidates at the time — were also in attendance.)

But now there’s a new twist.

The candidates are coming to speak on stage to the roughly 1,500 people here and then take questions in individual break-out sessions, which will have room for about 200 people each.

Senator Hillary Clinton, Senator Barack Obama and former Senator John Edwards are among those coming. And, it seemed, they were all participating in the break-out sessions.

While they are all still coming for the main show, it turns out that Senator Clinton is not attending the break-out session. Her campaign says it told the Kos organizers a week ago that she would not be attending the individual session, but the organizers did not announce it until tonight, at the opening dinner. The announcement drew big boos from the audience.

But hey, this is a tough crowd. Later in the evening, they booed Mother Teresa.

Update, to clarify: Here is a much-needed explanation about the booing of Mother Teresa that I should have provided earlier in the original post from the Kos conference: It was a passing reference to a light remark made by the emcee of a trivia quiz. One of the quiz questions was to identify three people in the 20th Century whom Congress had named as honorary United States citizens. When the emcee, Adam C. Bonin, offered her name as one of the correct answers, there was some booing and groaning because almost no one had guessed it. Mr. Bonin laughed that this might be the only crowd to boo Mother Teresa, but he was
making appropriate light of the unusual circumstance that booing was taking place in conjunction with a mention of Mother Teresa. The crowd was not dissing Mother Teresa herself. Hope this clarifies.

sources: http://www.nytimes.com/

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