One of the things I've been extremely impressed by about this year's Netroots Nation is the diversity of candidates who are here and the access we have to them. I've been here for less than 24 hours and I've already met three of our five Road To 60 senate challengers: Mark Begich running for senate in Alaska, Rick Noriega running here in Texas, and Jim Slattery running for senate in Kansas. Our intention with creating our Road To 60 list was to support red state challengers that represent the firewall between Democrats winning 6-8 seats and winning 8-11 seats for a true (i.e. Lieberman-less) 60 seat Democratic majority. We knew that by picking red state challengers  we may be sacrificing some ideological purity (i.e. "better Democrats") in favor of pure numbers ("more Democrats") but the environment that we find ourselves in in 2008 it was a trade-off well worth making. But here we are in Austin where three out of our five endorsed challengers are mixing with progressive bloggers, making the distinct calculus that even in their red states, speaking to the crazy basement-dwelling partisan bloggers is more asset than liability. Will they get some pushback from being here? Probably, in fact Rick Noriega already is. From Noriega's dailykos diary up right now:

Like last year, I've met hundreds of activists from across the country who are concerned about the direction our country has taken under George W. Bush and John Cornyn's failed leadership. So I'm not sure what John Cornyn was talking about yesterday when his campaign sent out a fundraising email attacking our community, saying that "Rick Noriega and his far left-wing blogger cronies are out of touch with Texas values."

Classic. The reason Cornyn feels the need to attack Noriega is that, as Rick told me when I met him this morning, 6 years ago in July of 2002, John Cornyn began pulling away from Ron Kirk, the Democrat running against him. Not so this year. It's telling that not only is Rick Noriega not hiding from his association with us but he is boasting about it at dailykos.

You can reward good behavior over at our Road To 60 ActBlue page.