About this time next week I’ll be rubbing shoulders with some of America’s most exciting progressive/liberal spokesmen and activists at the 2007 Take Back America Conference. I know I’ll wish I could clone myself, because there will be simultaneous sessions I’d die to attend. I suspect I’ll dither and make my choices at the last minute, as usual. But I’ve made my Amtrak reservations, booked the bed and breakfast, and now all I have to do is wash and pack. Am I excited? Yup, I am, and if I have as much fun as the last two years it I’ll have spent three days exceeding well.

Nearly all the announced candidates for the democratic nomination are confirmed to attend: Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Mike Gravel, Denis Kucinich, Barack Obama, and Bill Richardson. I don’t know why Chris Dodd isn’t on the list–he may just still appear. But more than candidates, some of the brightest stars of the left are going to be there speaking and leading discussions. The Blogosphere will be well represented. Atrios is going to speak, as is Jane Hamsher, and our own E. J. Graff and Nathan Newman are going to be there as well. Hey, Josh...come on down. You too, MJ, and Maggie Mahar, you come too. I’ll treat to iced tea all around. Grass roots, meet Net roots, and give the bad guys a good swat.

I’m going to listen to what all the candidates have to say, with as open a mind as I can conjure up. What will I be listening for? What will I expect? I think I’ll take my guidance from Cicero (the Roman, not Porky’s nephew) and from John Winthrop.

From Cicero I take two ideas, both of which inform Jefferson’s thinking: The first of these is reason, which Cicero describes this way:

This human animal—prescient, sagacious, complex, acute, full of memory, reason and counsel, which we call man,—is generated by the supreme God in a more transcendent condition than most of his fellow–creatures. For he is the only creature among the earthly races of animated beings endued with superior reason and thought, in which the rest are deficient. And what is there, I do not say in man alone, but in all heaven and earth, more divine than reason, which, when it becomes ripe and perfect, is justly termed wisdom?

What is this reason for? To discover Law...not to invent it. For Cicero, law had two components: equity and discrimination. "According to the Greeks, therefore, the name of law implies an equitable distribution of goods: according to the Romans, an equitable discrimination between good and evil."

The second Ciceronian idea is that of Rhetoric. Cicero understood this broadly: not merely grammar or argument in language, but argument using all the faculties of the human body:

With respect to man this same bountiful nature hath not merely allotted him a subtle and active spirit, but moreover favoured him with physical senses, like so many guardians and messengers. Thus has she improved our understanding in relation to many obscure principles, and laid the foundation of practical knowledge; and in all respects moulded our corporeal faculties to the service of our intellectual genius. For while she has debased the forms of other animals, who live to eat rather than eat to live, she has bestowed on man an erect stature, and an open countenance, and thus prompted him to the contemplation of heaven, the ancient home of his kindred immortals. So exquisitely, too, hath she fashioned the features of the human face, as to make them symbolic of the most recondite thoughts and sentiments. As for our two eloquent eyes (oculi nimis arguti), do they not speak forth every impulse and passion of our souls? And that which we call expression, in which we infinitely excel all the inferior animals, how marvellously it delineates all our speculations and feelings! Of this the Greeks well knew the meaning, though they had no word for it.

I will not enlarge on the wonderful faculties and qualities of the rest of the body, the modulation of the voice, and the power of oratory, which is perhaps the greatest instrument of our influence over human society.

I’m going to be happy to have the chance to see our candidates up close and in person, rather than mediated through television or print. What I see will be based on my faculties for observation and the speakers’ choices: not on sound bites or visual images chosen by third parties.

My responsibility will be to read all that the speaker says: what he or she says with his/her body, voice, gesture, and the like. Cicero likens our ability to do this to possessing both guardians and messengers. I hope to use my guardians to detect B. S. I hope to use my messengers to indicate my judgment of the speakers’ messages.

From John Winthrop’s On Liberty, I will take one caution: not to expect inhuman perfection in any candidate. Winthrop reminded us

I entreat you to consider that, when you choose magistrates, you take them from among yourselves, men subject to like passions as you are. Therefore, when you see infirmities in us, you should reflect upon your own, and that would make you bear the more with us, and not be severe censurers of the failings of your magistrates, when you have continual experience of the like infirmities in yourselves and others. We account him a good servant who breaks not his covenant. The covenant between you and us is the oath you have taken of us, which is to this purpose: that we shall govern you and judge your causes by the rules of God's laws and our own, according to our best skill.

I will, of course, translate this into more secular terms: but I accept the principal that my leaders undergo no magical or mystical transformation by the electoral process. I have a right to hold them to their word, to the fullest effort their strengths allow, to bear with them when things don’t work out exactly as planned, and to allow them to change course when experience demands a new direction.

I’ll see what I discover about these men an women while I’m in their company for three days. I will have the trusty old laptop with me, and I may say hi from down there, if I’m not all politicked out at the end of each day. If anyone else is going, I hope you’ll look around for me. I still look like my picture (the beard is wee bit more orderly), and at 6'7" tall, I’m not easily hidden in a crowd

aMike