It pains me to say this, but it needs to said. I’d like it very much if someday soon a woman is successful in becoming the President or the Vice-President. A Democratic woman, you understand. And there are not too many female Democrats out there that have the kind of resume that I feel would give them a good shot of getting one of those jobs. Representative Jane Harmen is one of them. She’s super smart, she’s tough, she’s experienced, and she’s the ranking member on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. She would have made a very attractive running mate for John Kerry. That being said, she is major part of the problem we are having in Washington DC right now with Democrats not demanding a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq and not insisting on an end to domestic surveillance of anti-Bush activists and the pizza delivery guy that is three times removed from a suspected terrorist (and all his friends). Jane Harman deplored the NSA leak and she has done NOTHING to stop the program.
I have been talking about creating a Party within the Party for a while now, and people like Jane Harman need primary challengers from true progressives in order to keep them in line. Well, Jane Harman has a primary challenger and she is saying all the right things.
Marcy Winograd
From Raw Story:
Powerful California Congresswoman Jane Harman (CA-36th) is facing a rare and surprisingly successful primary challenge, RAW STORY has learned. The Democratic powerhouse is set to face off this term with Marcy Winograd, a teacher, newscaster, peace activist and outspoken advocate for election reform.
“This is a primary to recapture the soul of the Democratic party of Bobby Kennedy and the Civil Rights movement,” said Marcy Winograd, president of Progressive Democrats in Los Angeles.
I like the sound of that. And it only gets better. A lot better. Check out the bio:
Born in New York, Winograd moved with her family in the early 1960s to California, where she participated in Vietnam anti-war marches. After earning a degree in political science at the University of California, Berkeley, she worked with legendary farm labor activist Cesar Chavez as a United Farm Workers Organizer.
She later served as legal assistant to Daniel Ellsberg during his trial for revealing the Pentagon Papers, which revealed suppressed facts about the Vietnam War.
Ellsberg has given a ringing endorsement to Winograd’s campaign.
“We, the people of California and of the US—not just the Democrats—need someone to represent us much, much better than a person who believes everything she hears from the intelligence community and arms complex, keeps their secrets of illegal warrantless wiretapping and endorses their crimes when they leak out,” Ellsberg said.
Winograd earned her teaching credentials at UCLA. She taught English and coached teachers, focusing on closing the achievement gap. Currently, she is a teacher expert in secondary literacy at Los Angeles Unified School District.
I also love what Winograd has to say about Harman’s reaction to the NSA scandal.
“I decided to run for office after watching Jane Harman on Meet the Press,” Winograd told RAW STORY. “I found her interview very disturbing. She was a lawyer, yet she didn’t know the law concerning the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).”
As the ranking minority member on the House Intelligence Committee, Harman was briefed by the Bush administration on warrantless wiretaps.
“Yet she never voiced any objections, never asked any questions, and then when the story was revealed by the New York Times, she tells [NBC’s] Tim Russert that it was horrible the information was ever leaked,” Winograd says.
This is my kind of woman. And, even though she lives in a district chock full of merchants of death arms contractors, she has pledged to refuse any contributions from them. Harman on the other hand:
has accepted over a quarter million dollars ($259,634) from the defense and aerospace industry since 1989, including $153,749 from Northrop Grumman. Northrop is her second highest contributor after Emily’s List.
In the 1995-96 election cycle, Harman was the fourth top recipient in the House for arms exporting firms’ political action committees, according to a report prepared by the Arms Trade Resource Center.
You can contibrute to her campaign or you can volunteer to her campaign. She is exactly the kind of candidate we need. Actually, we need about 535 more like her. And, you might think that she has no hope of knocking off someone as strong as Harman, but she is doing well among the rank and file.
In a startling upset, Winograd supporters blocked California Democratic Party endorsement of Harman, a six-term incumbent, at a pre-primary endorsement meeting. Winograd got 35 percent of the delegates’ votes, enough to prevent Harman from gaining the 70 percent needed for an automatic party endorsement. A floor fight is anticipated at the state convention April 28, where either candidate could win the state party endorsement by capturing a 60 percent margin.
I have been looking for good progressive candidates to get behind in the primaries. Marcy looks like a winner. If nothing else, it will send the right signal…and if we’re lucky, it could be a great victory and vindication for peace and for our civil liberties.
