“Hey John, so are you going to enter the race or not?” I asked back in the spring as I stood outside near my grape arbor.
“I don’t know [my real name],” he said. “I’m thinking about it. Someone on the Internet is pushing for me to and the DCCC has called.”
I told him the person on the Internet pushing for him to run was me. And I knew the DCCC was interested because our site meter on the old site was filled with DCCC.org visits coming in off Teh Google looking up information on him.
Some of you might remember in 2004 I worked hard mainly on the Kerry-Edwards campaign. I wrote diaries about it (here’s one example, my first ever recommended diary, West Virginia by DCDemocrat and Carnacki, appropriately on Halloween.
I didn’t work much – some canvassing and phone banking for the WV-02 candidate in the 2004 race.
We lost the presidential and the WV-02 race even though we had better candidates in both.
I did all I could in 2006 for Mike Callaghan, the Democratic challenger in WV-02 to beat the faux moderate Shelley Moore Capito, daughter of the federally convicted former Republican Gov. Arch Moore. We lost big, 57-42.
I met wvablue (Clem here) at a campaign event and the two of us became close friends, one of several great friends I’ve made through Daily Kos.
Instead of quitting, the two of us kept working. We didn’t stop with the 2006 election. The day afterwards we were already at work on the old site and with our offline meetings at Waffle House working to lay the groundwork for the 2008 race.
There wasn’t a Democratic or progressive group blog for the state. So we made one. We tried to draft fellow West Virginia Christy Hardin Smith from Fire Dog Lake to run, but she did not want to uproot her family. (Don’t worry, along with Howie Klein, we still have plans for drafting her for an office in the future, even if I have to forge her name on the candidacy papers…mwhahahah…Oh don’t act so shocked and pretend you haven’t committed election fraud in the past eith…you haven’t? Uh, never mind.)
So I thought who would give us the best chance at beating Shelley Moore Capito in WV-02?
I’ve known John Unger before he ran for office and liked him then. As my State Senator, I’ve touted him on the blog before (here’s one example from 2005).
In very Republican Berkeley and Jefferson counties, Unger won against a well financed and popular Republican challenger Jerry May (Berkeley 65 percent, Jefferson 67 percent).
wvablue and I looked at the math. If Unger could match Callaghan’s numbers in the rest of the WV-02 and hold his own in his home turf, because of the high density of the Eastern Panhandle Unger would beat Capito.
Now John is more socially conservative than I’d like on two issues: abortion and gay marriage. Both of those issues are important to me and I’m still working to persuade him to my point of view on them.
The truth of the matter is in this district, my ideal candidate would get crushed. My ideal candidate wouldn’t have a chance.
John does have a chance. CQ has just downgraded Capito’s chances. The DCCC has named this race one of the top challenger races so they’re committed and they wouldn’t be committed if they didn’t think he could win.
How often have those of us in the netroots complained that the Democrats don’t listen to us.
John is listening to us. On many other issues important to progressives – the Iraq war, respect for the U.S. Constitution, access to healthcare for every one, protecting labor rights, protecting the environment, opposition to torture, finding alternative sources of clean energy, helping the poor, he’s on our side.
So going back to those depressing days of November 2006. wvablue and I had several goals: find a viable candidate to run. We did that.
Get the DCCC in our race. We helped do that.
Get the Big Boys of Blogging paying attention to the race. We helped do that (clem is wvablue here. See also Kos’s Capito’s in the crosshairs and here.
I know a lot of us are disappointed in the performance of our Democrats.
But I know John. We’ve met with him several times. He’s joined us at Waffle House and talked politics with us from the early evening until 2 a.m.
He’s a guy who worked with Mother Theresa as a volunteer helping the poor and flood victims.
He took a year off from college to do it. Think about this a second if you don’t think John is committed to making the world better: he was the first person from his family to go to college. And he took a year off from doing so to spend a year as a volunteer in India. He went on to become a Rhodes scholar. In 2003 he worked with a nongovernmental organization (NGO) called Save the Children that followed the troops in after the invasion to do humanitarian work.
Some people talk about helping others. John’s done it.
The rightwingers in West Virginia mock Unger as “St. John.” He has a reputation as an independent voice in the state legislature when it comes to ethics issues.
Meanwhile let’s look at Shelley Moore Capito. Although she calls herself “independent” she’s voted consistently with Bush and the most extremist corporate agenda when it comes to the Iraq war, worker rights, and warrentless wiretapping.
She was the leading recipient of Tom Delay’s illegal PAC funds and formed a PAC with Republican Congressman Mark Foley while he was being a sexual predator of Congressional pages and she was one of three members on the Page Board. Her aides have been linked to Jack Abramhoff scandals and she was a recipient of campaign contributions from the Utah mine owner who wanted to reopen the collapsed mine back up for operations before the bodies were recovered and who has a history of fighting against safety regulations.
Capito is the Zelig of Republican scandals. You name it and she’s in the background. Is it because she’s clueless or turns a blind eye to wrong doing as with the Foley case? Is it because she’s willing to do anything to maintain her seat and help the Republican Party?
I don’t know what’s in her heart. I just know I’d rather have John Unger representing me in Congress.
But forget everything I wrote about Capito and Unger. Donate to his campaign because I’m tired of her. I’m physically and mentally tired of her.
Don’t do it for Unger. Don’t do it for the Democrats. (You know my thoughts on them. Don’t do it to eliminate someone like Capito who’ll vote for endless war and occupation.
Do it for me.
Do it because I spend two or more hours a day slogging it out at West Virginia Blue trying to help the grassroots and the state netroots. And a lot of my time is spent having to counter Capito’s bullshit lies.
No really, if we don’t knock her out of office now, she’s going to run for U.S. Senate in the future – or governor. Who knows? She’s the only big name Republican in West Virginia. And I am sick of writing about her.
Everyone else is asking for money now for their candidate. I’m asking for me. If I ever made you laugh about Wild Monkey Sex or smile with a happy story or you appreciated something I wrote on equality for gays, help me out here.
Unger is very close to meeting his fundraising goal for the quarter. As someone who helped get him into this thing, I’d love to be the one to put him over the top.
I ain’t got no money and if you can’t give I understand. But if you can, do me a favor and donate today.
Because I don’t want to write about Capito after the 2008 election.
If you can afford to donate, please donate. Any amount will help. $5, $10, $50, whatever you can afford. I’ll also assure you that Unger’s campaign won’t spend the money frivolously. I know because he’s a tightwad when it comes to spending money on campaigns. People had to sign out for his State Senate race yard signs so he could get them back after the election. So a $1 in this race will stretch a lot farther (further?) than in other races.