This weekend the DLC National Conversation (our annual meeting) got under way in Columbus, Ohio. Today’s public session, featuring speeches by Hillary Clinton, Tom Vilsack (our new chairman), Evan Bayh, Mark Warner, and Tom Carper, will undoubtedly get some serious national press, but in some respects, the heart of the meeting was yesterday, when we held 22 workshops on a variety of policy and political topics. We knew there would be more than 300 state and local elected officials here from more than forty states, but the interesting thing was that every one of them seemed to show up for a full menu of three workshops. I moderated three of them. The first, on “values and frames” (a discussion of the Lackoffian theory of message development, and others, including our own) had to be moved to an auditorium after about 80 people showed up. The second, on Religion and Politics, was SRO. And even in the shank of the afternoon, we had a full room for a discussion of that wonkiest of political topics, election reform and redistricting reform. And best as I could tell, every other workshop was pretty much sold-out as well. These folks (about half of whom were attending their first DLC national event) are hungry to learn and win.Those folks who think of the DLC as an inside-the-beltway organization of old white guys would probably have been surprised by the sheer number of state and local attendees, and their diversity in terms of race and gender (about half the attendees were women). Even ideologically, I think we drew a fairly representative cross-section of state and local Democratic elected officials. The tone of most sessions, though infused with a sense of urgency, was upbeat. There was no talk of litmus tests or purges (please take note, Kos), and as usual with these events, a lot of networking and best-practices exchanges in small gatherings between the formal meetings. We were picketed by a local activist group called the Spine Project which pretty much shows up at every Democratic gathering in Ohio to express their displeasure at the Party’s failure to challenge the presidential outcome in this state. But it was reasonably friendly. All in all, the vibes have been good, and I expect that to continue today.