Debbie Cook and Larry Kissell: Two Progressive Democrats for '08

OpEdNews, 8-30-08

Candidates for Congress who deserve our support

It's Democratic Convention time in Denver, and this week we'll be seeing some of the most promising '08 House and Senate candidates on display. Many have been struggling for a turn in the spotlight all year, as the presidential race between Barack Obama and John McCain continues to monopolize attention, volunteer energy and fundraising dollars.

Earlier this year, community activist Donna Edwards beat longtime Congressman and friend to corporate interests Al Wynn in the Democratic primary for Maryland’s 4th Congressional District. Small donations raised online from progressives nationwide were critical to Edwards' anti-war, populist campaign, and allowed her to counter Wynn's desperate, lobbyist-funded, slash and burn attack ad scramble to hang onto his seat.

Here are profiles (and links to their websites and fundraising pages) of two other progressive Democrats running for House seats. These contests will help determine whether the party can hold off Republicans' attempts to seize back control of Congress, or add seats to the Democratic majority they gained in 2006.

Debbie Cook (CA-46)



Barack Obama and Debbie Cook in Newport Beach, CA

Orange County, California's 46th Congressional District has been represented since 1988 by delusionally far-right Republican Dana Rohrabacher. But this year he faces a stiff challenge from Huntington Beach mayor and former city council member Debbie Cook.

Rohrabacher was first elected to Congress with the fundraising help of his pal Ollie North. He's a right wing nut who doesn’t believe in global warming, joking during a 2007 congressional hearing on climate change that previous warming cycles may have been caused by "dinosaur flatulence." He was a close associate and campaign contribution recipient of disgraced Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who Rohrabacher described as "a very honest man" when the Abramoff scandal first broke in 2005.



Although from a coastal California district, he supports lifting the offshore oil drilling ban, and recently questioned whether abuses at Guantanamo Bay qualified as torture, or merely "hazing pranks from some fraternity."

By contrast, Debbie Cook entered politics in 1989 fighting for things that matter. She led Save Our Parks and Beaches, a grassroots group that saved part of Huntington Beach Central Park from being turned into an 18-hole golf course. She is a former PTA President, small business owner, and attorney who earned her law degree at age 40. Cook became counsel for the Bolsa Chica Land Trust and helped preserve the Bolsa Chica wetlands when they were threatened with development in the mid-90s. The court victory she won protects coastal wetlands throughout California.

Elected to the city council in 2000, and re-elected in 2004, Cook now serves as mayor of Huntington Beach. She is on the board of directors of the national Post Carbon Institute, and will be a leader on environmental and sustainable energy issues in Congress.



In July, the Cook Political Report (no relation to Debbie) downgraded Rohrabacher’s re-election effort from "solid Republican" to "likely Republican." During the second quarter, Cook actually outraised Rohrabacher, collecting $78,712 to his $92,990. But as of June 30, he still had a substantial financial advantage, with $387,950 on hand to Cook’s $97,392.

Debbie Cook's website is HERE and ActBlue fundraising page is HERE.

Larry Kissell (NC-08)



Larry Kissell is a high school social studies teacher and former textile worker who is fighting a rematch with incumbent Republican Robin Hayes to represent North Carolina's 8th District. In 2006, Hayes clung to his seat against Kissell by only 329 votes in what was almost the closest congressional race in the country.

Hayes is one of the wealthiest members of Congress, an heir to the Cannon Mills textile fortune. His working class district, which stretches between Charlotte and Fayetteville, has suffered severe manufacturing job losses since Hayes was first elected in 1998. Hayes went back on his word to oppose the CAFTA free trade agreement, providing George W. Bush with the 1-vote margin of victory it needed to pass on July 27, 2005. Earlier, Hayes had promised, "I am flat-out, completely, horizontally opposed to CAFTA," and admitted "it's not in the best interests of the core constituency I represent."



In 2006, Hayes also provoked controversy and headaches for the GOP when he suggested that "stability in Iraq ultimately depends on spreading the message of Jesus Christ…everything depends on everyone learning about the birth of the Savior." He received zero ratings in 2005 from the League of Conservation Voters, in 2005-06 from the National Education Association, and in 2007 from the Children's Health Fund.

A study released earlier this month by the Sunlight Foundation ranked Hayes as the #1 member of Congress with personal financial investments in oil industry stocks. Not surprisingly, Hayes recently called the need for increased off-shore oil drilling the number one issue this election year.

Larry Kissell knows first hand about the economic hardships that pro-corporate trade policies have brought to his district. He worked in the textile industry for 27 years until plant closings forced him to switch careers, becoming a high school social studies teacher in 2001. He is a deacon at First Baptist Church and two-time past President of the Biscoe, NC Lions Club.



Kissell is a regular guy who understands the difficulties his neighbors face with the economy in the tank. As he said in an on-line chat with FireDogLake in 2006:

"What folks in my district talk about are the kitchen table issues that impact their daily lives. They want a Congressman willing to stop all the bad trade deals ruining our economy, a strong advocate of education and something finally done about high energy costs with a significant investment in alternative energy."

In July, Kissell told the Fayetteville Observer that he first ran for Congress two years ago because gas prices were high and the economy was shaky, but "things have gotten worse...our days of George Bush are thankfully numbered."

After not getting full financial support from the national Democratic party in 2006, this year the DCCC is firmly behind Kissell’s campaign. Kissell recently released his first TV ad, telling voters Robin Hayes has "had his chance" during 10 years in Congress and done nothing about the loss of 60,000 N.C. jobs or gas prices jumping by $3 a gallon.



Last March, Congressional Quarterly ranked the race "No Clear Favorite," its most competitive ranking. The Cook Political Report upgraded the Hayes-Kissell rematch from "leans Republican" to "toss-up" in early June. But Kissell had only $231,583 in cash on hand at the end of June, versus $1.2 million for Robin Hayes.

Larry Kissell's website is HERE and ActBlue fundraising page is HERE.

Visit these two candidates' websites to learn more about them and their House races. Consider donating to their campaigns. And check out Blue America PAC for snapshots of three dozen progressive House and Senate Democratic candidates running to change America this fall.

Digg It.

Memo to Netroots: Stop Tearing Down Obama's VP List

The Huffington Post, 8-19-08

(UPDATE 8/23: As the world found out via text message shortly after 3:00 AM EST, my wife and I both lost our bet. Kudos to Steve Clemons for having accurate info all week long about Joe Biden being Obama's impending pick.



Biden's been on the national stage since he led the fight against Robert Bork's extreme right wing Supreme Court nomination in 1987, but stepping into the VP nominee spotlight, he'll probably surprise people who think they know him. For someone who heads the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden may be the most average Joe in the Senate, with a middle class bankroll (ranked 99th in net worth out of 100 Senators in 2005), and a daily commute to Washington on Amtrak from his home in Wilmington, Delaware. His wife, Jill, is a full-time educator at Delaware Technical and Community College.)

(UPDATE 8/21: As the veepstakes drag on, my wife's prediction is looking better and better. Yesterday, Team Obama swiftly issued a denial of press reports that he would be at an event in Indianapolis on Saturday following the VP roll-out in Springfield, IL, which sounds suspiciously like an attempt to keep the secret in the bag).

My wife and I have a bet on who Barack Obama will choose as his vice presidential nominee. She says Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN), while my money’s on Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine. But the more I think about Bayh, and the mini-controversy surrounding his name being in contention, the more I’m convinced I may be backing the wrong horse.



Bayh would bring a lot of strengths to an Obama ticket. He’s got experience as a former two-term Governor and has served in the Senate since 1999. He is a politically moderate former chair of the Democratic Leadership Council, and would provide ideological balance to Obama’s progressive credentials. He could carry his home state of Indiana for the Democrats, a reliably Republican bastion that John McCain is counting on to get to 270 electoral votes.

Most importantly, Bayh would help attract votes for Obama in the battleground Midwest, the most hotly contested region in the country. In 2004, John Kerry swept the Northeast and West Coast by large margins, and George W. Bush won by landslides in the South, Rocky Mountain West and Great Plains. However, the popular vote in the Midwest was an exact tie – 49.6% to 49.6%.

Yet a group of netroots activists are trying to scuttle Bayh’s chances of getting the VP nod. Last week the New York Times ran a profile of Bayh that reminded us he co-sponsored the Iraq War Resolution in 2003, and the next day activists set up a Facebook group called "100,000 Strong Against Evan Bayh for VP."

The effort fell short of its call to arms to "grow this group to 100,000 in a day and send a clear message to the Obama campaign," with 3,794 members as of Monday afternoon. Still, noted liberal bloggers like Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon and OpenLeft's Chris Bowers and Matt Stoller signed on, as word of the campaign spread through the blogosphere and immediately attracted press coverage.

Over the weekend, Washington insider Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation posted on his blog that "sources close to Obama report to me that after the 'surge of concern' on the net about Evan Bayh, he has not been selected as Obama's VP running mate." Bloggers fanning the flames of the Bayh "reverse draft" promptly rejoiced. But if any leaks dissing Bayh are coming out of the previously ironclad, no-drama Obama machine, it’s likely he was never going to be the VP pick.

The Obama camp has already shown it couldn’t care less what the netroots think by its handling of the FISA wiretap issue. Which is a smart move, because netroots bloggers are a lot more irrelevant than most of them would like to believe.



This primary season, the darling presidential candidate of the blogosphere was not Obama, but John Edwards, the candidate running for president while hiding a big secret. No one can be blamed for not realizing Edwards was concealing an affair, yet his constant missteps throughout the campaign showed terrible political judgement.

Just as Howard Dean’s support from bloggers in 2004 never materialized into off-line, real world votes, Edwards’ campaign sputtered out in ’08 after a series of mostly third place finishes in the early contests. As Obama caught fire, building an enormous online fundraising machine and winning votes without the endorsement or support of some of the biggest name liberal bloggers, some of them felt sidelined.

Is this why the netroots are wasting time and energy tearing down one of Obama’s potential VP choices? I hope not.

A few of the same bloggers now campaigning against Bayh were lukewarm on Obama from the start. Amanda Marcotte was actually hired by Edwards in early 2007 as a campaign blogger before resigning in controversy over some of her incendiary past blog postings attacking Catholicism. Bowers posted an "Obama Campaign Post-Mortem" in October, 2007 that proclaimed "losing the netroots has been the downfall of Barack Obama's campaign." Following Obama's FISA vote, Stoller accused the presumptive nominee of being "part of that old politics, in this case, that he said he wasn't. It will spur us to challenge him."



The anti-Bayh Facebook group labels him "a career legacy politician who fell hook, line, and sinker for the administration's case for a disastrous war." But like John Edwards eventually renounced his vote for the Iraq War, Bayh also admits he was wrong. "Senator Bayh has shown the judgment that we need to admit that mistakes were made and we need to learn from them," said a Bayh spokesman. Since the netroots took the credibility-challenged Edwards at his word when he apologized for his Iraq vote, why can’t Bayh catch the same break?

Some activists have also voiced problems with Evan Bayh (and Tim Kaine) for their less than total support for the pro-choice agenda. Bayh’s record on abortion rights is mixed. In 2003, he received a 50% rating from NARAL, although in 2006, the anti-choice National Right to Life Committee gave him a 25% rating.

The pro-choice movement has lost a lot of ground over the past few decades. The right has made a concerted effort to pack the federal judiciary with rabidly conservative, anti-choice judges. Their ultimate goal is to overturn Roe v. Wade, and return us to the days of back alley abortions. Now they’re only one Supreme Court seat away from a solid anti-choice majority.

Obama’s pro-choice record is pretty stellar. If he selects a vice presidential nominee who has triangulated on the abortion issue, should pro-choice activists sit out the election? Not voting for Obama means helping elect John McCain and flushing Roe v. Wade right down the toilet. This is not rocket science.

And as McCain made clear last week, he might make a play for disaffected Hillary Democrats by choosing a VP who’s pro-choice, like former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge. "We need to accept both points of view," said Ridge about running with McCain. "He’s not judgemental about me or my belief. He just disagrees with me."



If the left is ever going to get serious about winning elections, we need to stop insisting on 100% ideological purity from our candidates. News flash to progressives: politics is about assembling winning coalitions. In 2004, only 23% of Americans described themselves as liberal, versus 26% middle of the road and 32% conservative. Unless you’re running to represent a constituency that’s dependably left of center, it’s almost impossible to get elected without appealing to the middle.

So here's a message for the netroots. If Obama picks Evan Bayh, or Tim Kaine, or someone else who you don’t agree with on every issue, get over it. Look at the realities of the political map. Save your fire for the real enemy, the GOP slime machine that’s trying its best to render Obama unelectable. Encourage readers of your blogs to volunteer for the Obama campaign to register new voters. Conduct opposition research on John McCain’s short list, post the findings, and set up Facebook groups opposing some of them for VP. Otherwise, by screwing around with Obama’s VP selection, you’re doing McCain’s work for him.

The Blogosphere Bites Back

The News & Observer, Raleigh NC, 2-13-07

If you were anywhere near the political blogosphere last week, you might have noticed a firestorm over the latest campaign moves by local presidential hopeful John Edwards. The candidate's newest staffers, two progressive bloggers named Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan, found themselves in hot water over things they'd previously posted to their personal political blogs. The controversy erupted only days after the campaign announced the two women's hires, as part of Edwards' efforts to harness the emerging power of the netroots in his quest for the Democratic nomination.

Anti-religious charges against the bloggers were first led by right-wing typing heads and media figures like syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin, and William Donohue, president of the conservative Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. They highlighted the bloggers' incendiary past postings, like a June, 2006 excerpt from Marcotte's blog Pandagon when she described the immaculate conception in vulgar terms and asked what would have happened if Mary used birth control ("A: You’d have to justify your misogyny with another ancient mythology"), and McEwan's reference to Bush supporters as "wingnut Christofascists."

According to what Salon.com described as "sources in and close to the campaign," Team Edwards' initial response to the flap was to fire Marcotte and McEwan. But as news hit the blogosphere, liberal activists vented their rage at Edwards for not standing by his bloggers. Their offending posts, after all, had been written before they were hired by the campaign. Many a political blogger with dreams of one day also making the transition to paid staffer was undoubtedly alarmed. As the on-line fury spread, internal discussions began within the campaign about re-hiring the bloggers. By week's end, a supportive statement from the candidate appeared on Edwards' website, saying that "the tone and the sentiment of some of Amanda Marcotte's and Melissa McEwan's posts personally offended me. It's not how I talk to people, and it's not how I expect the people who work for me to talk to people...but I also believe in giving everyone a fair shake."

The netroots were quick to claim victory, and most heralded Edwards for doing "the right thing" by refusing to bow to pressure from conservatives for the bloggers' scalps. Many pointed out that the blogger's main accusers, Malkin and Donohue, are themselves no strangers to charges of bigotry and offensive rhetoric. Donohue has claimed that "Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular," has referred to the "gay death style," and during the 2004 campaign said that "if a Catholic votes for Kerry because they support him on abortion rights that is to cooperate in evil." Malkin has called liberal San Francisco "a hate filled city," and her book In Defense of Internment justifies the decision during World War II to force 112,000 Japanese aliens and U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry into internment camps.

Edwards, like the rest of the '08 field, is making it up as he goes along in attempting to re-create the internet magic of Howard Dean's 2004 amazing money harvesting machine. But the Bloggergate mess raised disturbing questions on all sides. What does it say about the current state of the Edwards campaign that these job positions were not properly vetted, since bloggers' words are available on the internet for all to see? Or that the campaign let itself be taken off message for an entire week over a staffing decision? More importantly, how can the left expect to overcome the right's skill at exploiting the media echo chamber if netroots activists insist on turning a candidate's controversial hires into loyalty tests? The rule is generally when you work for candidates, don't do anything to embarrass them. As soon as you become the story, your services are no longer required.

Even members of the religious left stepped up to denounce the bloggers' comments. "We have gone so far to rebuild that coalition [between Democrats and religious Christians] and something like this sets it back," said Brian O’Dwyer, chair of the National Democratic Ethnic Leadership Council. He called Edwards' decision not to fire the bloggers "not only wrong morally — it’s stupid politically." The Edwards campaign probably hasn't seen the last of this controversy, and may continue to be distracted by negative public reaction to these staffers' writings until it finds some way to ease them off the payroll.

Lost in the shuffle was the fact that last Monday, Edwards became the first of the '08 presidential contenders to release a detailed plan for universal health care coverage, a mix of innovative policy solutions similar to those now being implemented by states like Massachusetts and California. Lesson? When the blogosphere roars, the cacophony may drown out even the most disciplined campaign's attempts to discuss things that truly matter.