As a resident of Pennsylvania that supports a woman’s right to choose, I was incredibly upset when Sen. Chuck Schumer, Gov. Ed Rendell, and Treasurer Bob Casey Jr. entered into a conspiracy to sweep the field clean of viable Senate candidates so that Bob Casey Jr. could be coronated as the Democratic nominee. I was a foulmouthed and vituperative critic of Schumer for his arrogance in arrogating to himself the power of the Democratic Party of Pennsylvania to choose our own leaders. I didn’t appreciate his heavy-handedness in Ohio either, where he screwed over Paul Hackett in favor of Sherrod Brown (even though I favored Brown).
So, I absolutely welcome Chuck Schumer’s decision to ask the Daily Kos community (and the netroots generally) for their input into who we should recruit to run for the Senate in 2008. I could be quite cynical about this, but I choose to take it in a positive light. And I hope that my rantings against Schumer played some small part in getting him to recognize the importance of letting the rank and file have a say in who our nominees will be.
So here are my answers for Senator Schumer. Number one: no matter who you recruit, do not discourage primaries. What little money you save will not be worth it. Let the party of each state decide.
Number Two: you were a member of the House. Look at the House. The biggest caucus in the House is the Progressive Caucus. They control most of the committees. They have the Speaker’s chair. Where are the progressives in the Senate? There are too few of them. Look for progressives for Senate seats, and be aggressive about it. Russ Feingold and Bernie Sanders need some company.
Number Three: I’ve looked at the Senate 2008 races. I’ve researched the names floating around. And I don’t see very many women. Jill Docking has been mentioned in Kansas and Katrina Swett has been mentioned in New Hampshire. There must be more qualified women candidates, but I am not hearing them mentioned. Look for them. Call Emily’s List.
Number Four: So many of the states that are up in 2008 are from red states, including the deep south, that there might be a temptation to recruit socially conservative candidates. Don’t fall for that trap. Look at how well Rudy Guiliani is polling among conservatives. That Culture War rhetoric is so 1990’s. We can do much better by appealing to people’s pocketbook issues, accountable government, protecting our rights, and restoring America’s reputation for competence and fair-play.
Number Five: Keep the DLC at arms length. They have some excellent candidates, like Rush Holt (who should run against Lautenberg) and Tom Allen in Maine and Tom Udall in New Mexico. Generally speaking, however, the DLC is a spent force within the party. With Hillary Clinton polling lower in the Netroots’ polls than The New Republic’s circulation numbers…well…just don’t go to that well too often. Remember: Harold Ford Jr. didn’t run the best campaign of 2006. Harold Ford Jr. ran a disastrous campaign and lost to a truly lightweight candidate in Bob Corker.
I see that David Wu in Oregon and Artur Davis in Alabama are two DLC candidates that are considering running for Senate. Keep looking. Wu and Davis have some good qualities, but they won’t light up the blogosphere.
Anyone that has ideas about who to recruit for the following seats, please let us know.
Alabama:
Alaska:
Colorado:
Georgia:
Idaho:
Kansas:
Kentucky:
Mississippi:
Nebraska:
New Hampshire:
New Mexico:
Minnesota:
Oklahoma:
Oregon:
South Carolina:
Tennessee:
Texas:
Virginia:
Wyoming:
Mississippi: Ray Mabus
I’m not prepared to say some primaries shouldn’t be encouraged to be closed — I think about what happened in PA in 2000, when a 5-way primary divided by region and by abortion led to a Democratic party so fractured and broke that the nominee (Ron Klink) had no chance against Santorum.
Primaries are great when candidates need seasoning, and they sometimes are necessary to lay out ideological splits within the party, but unless they’re going to be waged in a way that makes the party unifiable afterwards, I’m not prepared to say they’re always a good thing.
that’s like saying that you are not prepared to say that doing a bong hit is always a bad thing. Well, no shit. The question isn’t whether every instance of doing a bong hit will make you into a child predator. The question is whether you should outlaw doing bong hits.
Schumer should not discourage primaries. We repealed prohibition for a good reason.
I’m losing the analogy a little bit, but, okay, I’m lame.
I can’t think of a reason to discourage primary challenges to incumbents, for what it’s worth.
Well Schumer is obviously even more opposed to primaries for incumbents than he is for his dauphins.
Institutionally, he has to be; they’re the only ones who can transfer unlimited sums to him, and they’re the ones who put him in that place.
I try to game-theory out a Casey-(Hoeffel or Hafer) primary, and however it ends, the winner’s broke the day after the primary, and Santorum’s got a $20M head start and runs ads immediately. That’s the fear.
yes. He has to be and I don’t begrudge his bias towards his comrades in the Senate. That is why I do not focus my criticism on his hostility to primaries against incumbents. He should recruit candidates and make the case for them, but he should never clear the field…ever. He represents the Senate’s concerns, and that is all. Morrison was his guy in Montana. He was wrong. He should do his best and then stand back and support the winner. We can make up the money.
We don’t have a lot of competitive primaries to go on for this cycle in terms of the contestable Senate races against Republican incumbents — just Webb-Miller and Tester-Morrison, unless you want to count the primary in Maine between two people who likely had no chance of beating Olympia Snowe. There was the CA-Gov primary, though, where an ugly primary blew a winnable general.
In terms of open seats, that MD-SEN primary got ugly, and it might have made that general closer than it needed to be.
Maybe the PA-2000 thing was an anomaly.
I don’t really understand your thinking on PA-2000.
We lost because of who won the primary, not because we had one.
Because a pro-gun, pro-life candidate not from Philadelphia or Pittsburgh can’t beat Rick Santorum in a statewide race? Well, we kinda disproved that one.
It’s not the who, it’s the how: In a primary that divided and in a state this big, and with Schwartz’s fundraising advantages, Klink knew he could win if he stayed in and dominated his geographic base — and that’s what he did, borne out by the county-by-county results — Klink took 10% in Phila, 6% in Chester, 8% in Bucks, 5% in MontCo, 7% in DelCo, but made up for it with 70%+ wins in Allegheny, Beaver, Washington and Westmoreland Counties. So he focused all his attention there, not crossing the Susquehanna.
So he won the primary, and was broke afterwards. As of July 1, Santorum had $4.3 million CoH to his monts-post-primary $564,500. The rest, you know. So, the question is how much to fault Klink for his primary strategy, and how much to fault SE PA (and its fundraising base) for not embracing him afterwards.
Klink ran TV ads for the general election in Central Pennsylvania. In the ads, he said he wanted every child in Pennsylvania to be able to go to college because he didn’t have the opportunity to go to college when he was young even though he really, really wanted an education. Which was a silly ad for someone his age—he could have gone to night school, then to community college, dropped out and saved money, etc., just like the rest of us his age who did manage to get through college.
So he spent his ad money to tell voters he was uneducated and that he wasn’t smart enough or determined enough to figure out how to get to school.
I had a really, really hard time forcing myself to go to the polling place that year.
Of the five major Democratic candidates for mayor of Philaelphia in 2007, three did not attend college: Congressmen Chaka Fattah (HS dropout, GED, Masters in Gov’t Admin from Penn) and Bob Brady (high school grad), and self-financing millionaire Tom Knox (HS dropout, GED). Link.
This is similar to what happened in IL-06, where the national Party fractured the local party by forcing Tammy Duckworth into the field with endorsements from machine politicians such as Kerry, Clinton, Obama and Emanuel. And notice Tammy bought the primary but could not buy the general.
Cegelis would have won the general.
And Cegelis was obviously much more progressive than Duckworth.
Given how R-heavy that district is, and given that Cegelis’ fundraising was poor and her vaunted grassroots network couldn’t deliver a primary win, I’m can’t agree with that conclusion. It may well be that Cegelis would have done even worse than Duckworth in the general.
we’ll never know, but I believe in the last election cycle it would have been better to go with Cegelis’s messaging.
All this red/blue analysis is based on history. The whole country is shifting blue, and shifting blue hard.
It’s definitely the case in 2006 that a number of female candidates in close House races lost, all of whom seemed to soft-pedal the war as an issue: Tammy Duckworth, Lois Murphy, Patricia Madrid and Diane Farrell.
Yes. There is not one single politician that paid a price for being against this war in the 2006 election. Not one. But there are plenty that paid a price for not being against it enough.
Number one: no matter who you recruit, do not discourage primaries. What little money you save will not be worth it. Let the party of each state decide.
Hallelujah and amen.
Also, remember that netroots is young, white, and male, while the Democratic party’s base is female and minority, especially in the South. Don’t dis blacks and women.
Alabama: Lucy Baxley – Claire McCaskill made a comeback two years after a failed gubernatorial bid, and even if Baxley does not win, she will certainly force Sessions to spend a lot of money. And Alabamans certainly deserve a real debate. Baxley has won statewide, and she is photogenic.
Alaska: ???????????????
Colorado: Rep. Udall should run
Georgia: ???????????????????
Idaho: ????????????????????????
Kansas: ????????????????????
Kentucky: ??????????????????????
Mississippi: Attorney General Jim Hood, who ousted a Republican incumbent in 2003, State Senator Deborah Dawikins, who is very bright, or Cindy Hyde-Smith, who understands agricultural issues.
Nebraska: ?????????????????????????????
New Hampshire: ??????????????????????
New Mexico: Many will object to this, but this is my sincere recommendation: Patricia Madrid. She will carry northern New Mexico, split the vote if not win Albuquerque, and she is from Las Cruces in southern New Mexico. With Domenici and Wilson embroiled in a scandal indirectly involving Madrid’s campaign, I imagine she has a real chance. Madrid has won statewide, and she received a lot of training in her bid against Wilson.
Minnesota: State Senator Mee Moua and/or Rep. Betty McCollum
Oklahoma: ????????????????????????????????
Oregon: ??????????????????????????
South Carolina: ??????????????????????????
Tennessee: State Senator Rosalind Kurita, who can claim she is bipartisan after she voted for a Republican Majority Leader in the Senate, and who is much more progressive than Harold Ford, Jr., who swept her out of the race in order to pursue his insane ambitions.
Texas: Run Barbara Ann Radnofsky. She will eviscerate Cornyn. Texans at least had the chance to meet her last cycle.
Virginia: ?????????????????????
Wyoming: ????????????????????
IMO Baxley’s shot her bolt and will not be a factor. Her campaign for Governor was a disaster,even considering that Riley was probably unbeatable. The impression she gave was that she deserved to be Governor because she had put in her time with the party and was Lieutenant Governor. She never laid out a platform to differentiate herself from Riley and was a lackluster speaker. Not to be catty, but her “photogenic” looks are courtesy of a good surgeon.
For far too long, the Democratic National Committee has rewarded the faithful with nominations. That simply doesn’t work any more. While the mood of the nation is swerving just slightly left of center, what’s more apparent is that people are searching for options outside of “the beltway.”
In Florida, for example, we had a senate candidate who looked and talked (nay, lectured) like your third grade teacher, and a cousin of Terry McCauliff (I believe) who couldn’t even answer a question about paying for his programs in the major debate of the campaign.
What’s needed are refreshing names and bright people. Franken is a good example. While you’ve listed Minnesota, I think that he will be very successful there. He’s intelligent and those who are dubious about his “comedy” background need only look at the comedians we have now. (Inhofe?)
It’s also vital–as everyone has heard–to challenge every house seat, to force the Republicans to spend a lot of money on people who believe they are sure bets (cf. Hastert!). With netroots action, it’s not that expensive to mount a challenge to a fixture.
OK- going along so smoothly. Complete agreement-THEN- “keep the dlc at arms length”. Come on Mr Boo- are you kidding. They are so bloody pernicious that it is a joke. Just don’t give those pieces of shit an inch. Harold ford- anti womens rights, joe liebershit war mongerer and liar. ARMS LENGTH!- what should be done is hire the out of work t delay- he is a bugman – let hime disinfect that cesspool of liars!
Bill-
things are more complicated than that. People can’t be pigeon-holed into categories quite so easily. Tom Udall, for example, is listed as a member of both the New Democrats and the Progressive Caucus. Patrick Murphy and Kirsten Gillebrand are members of the Blue Dogs. Look at the voting records first, the caucus affiliation second.
another to consider
Texas Richard Morrison
Allyson Schwartz. She has it all and is a formidable candidate everywhere in the state, IMO!
http://schwartz.house.gov/
On right to choose:
http://www.ppspvotes.org/voters_guide_detail.asp
As a native Pennsylvanian relocated to Alabama, I’ve found that even “progressive” Democrats here would be considered Republicans anywhere else but Liebermanland. I’m not all that happy with some of Davis’s positions, but I think he’s the best of the lot by a long shot. He’s very sharp, gives a great speech, and is committed to public service. It’s a pretty thin field for recruiting.
Does race factor into your assessment? The press made a lot of the fact that Harold Ford is black, but in the end it looks like Tennessee gave him full consideration on the merits. He certainly could have won, with maybe a lucky break or a slightly better campaign.
Of course, Tennessee and Alabama are different places.
Race is certainly a factor, and a Republican will be hard to beat in this political backwater. But the large population centers – Birmingham and Montgomery in particular – are heavily African-American and fairly well organized. If Davis were to lose the Senate race in 2008 he would be primed to run for the open Governor’s seat in 2010, probably against Hubbard.
Governor of Kansas seems to be overlooked here. Maybe the problem is that she has done her job without a lot of controversy? Maybe the problem is is that she faced down the lot of repubs and showed them how to govern?
i think its time to reframe number 3.
i want to see more women, more people of color, more people who arent god fearing, more people who arent heterosexual.
in other words i want to see less white straight christian men…..but i want progressives above all else.
Al Franken for Senate from Minnesota. And not just cuz he’s my Xth cousin.