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Roll Call: Burner surprises national Dems (and R’s)

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Yeah, sure… when I talk up Darcy Burner, you can dismiss that as partisan puffery. But when Roll Call says “Reichert May Face Tough Challenge From Neophyte,” um, well… you can bet the R’s are more than a little bit nervous.

While McMorris, whose district sits safely east of the Cascade Mountains in strong GOP territory, likely will coast back to Congress, Reichert may have to fight tooth-and-nail to become a sophomore.

Reichert represents a classic swing suburban district outside of Seattle that is becoming more Democratic. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) took the 8th district with 51 percent of the vote in 2004, compared to President Bush’s 48 percent, and Reichert won with just 52 percent last time.

“The 8th is a swing, Democratic district,” concedes Reichert’s political consultant Bruce Boram. “Any Democratic opponent who runs against Reichert starts at 43 percent [of the vote].”

Add that more than 60 percent of 8th district voters currently believe the country is on the wrong track, according to recent polls, that the popularity of Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress are at all-time lows and that the district “is definitely trending in the Democrats’ favor,” and “it’s an environment where you have to take that seriously,” Boram added.

The factors Boram ticks off combine to make a potent electoral cocktail, but what could make it a double for Reichert is money.

Democrat Darcy Burner surprised national Democrats, Republicans and probably Reichert by outraising him 2-1 in the first quarter of this year.

She still trails him in overall cash on hand, but she dramatically narrowed the ratio with a stellar three-month period that saw her bring in $140,000 in the last 10 days of March.

Boram said Reichert likely began April with more than $700,000 while Burner had $355,000 in the bank.

Burner gave her campaign $25,000 and loaned it $10,000 but is not expected to seriously self-fund.

“Darcy Burner has done a phenomenal job establishing herself as an aggressive candidate for change right out of the gate,” said Kate Bedingfield, a spokeswoman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “She’s really demonstrated she’s going to make a run at this seat.”

She certainly has.

WA’s most modest congressman

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We all know that 4th Congressional District Rep. Doc Hastings is an incompetent, partisan hack… but who knew he was so modest? The General went browsing around Hastings website today, and couldn’t find any mention of his “leadership” of the House Ethics Committee, a tenure during which not a single ethics case has been heard.

You’ve obviously scared everyone in Congress into faithfully following ethics rules. Otherwise, your hearing schedule would be packed. Of course there will always be misunderstandings like Duke Cunningham’s incarceration, the free market lawmaking approach taken by representatives DeLay, Noe, Pombo, Blunt, Doolittle, Harris, Hunter, Ney, Chocola, yourself, and others, and Don Sherwood’s penchant for strangling mistresses, but you’ve obviously found a way to clear their good names without resorting to hearings. That’s one heck of an accomplishment.

You’re doing yourself a tremendous disservice by not publicizing all of this great work. Do yourself a favor and add your Ethics Committee accomplishments to your website. And while you’re at it, put your name and photograph on the Ethics website as well. I couldn’t find either anywhere there. It’s almost like you’re ashamed of the things you’ve accomplished as Chair.

Hmm. Wouldn’t it be nice if Washingtonians could erase our shame by removing any reference to Hastings from our congressional delegation? Jimmy over at McCranium has some suggestions.

Third time’s the charm for McGavick campaign?

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Despite the fact that he is “extremely proud of all that we have achieved in the last eight months,” Mike McGavick’s campaign manager, Ian Goodhew announced his resignation yesterday. In a prepared statement, Goodhew said that “our early success has taken more of a personal toll on me than I had anticipated.”

Um, yeah… success always does that, I guess.

For his part, McGavick sent Goodhew off with a glowing letter of recommendation:

“Ian has shown great leadership throughout this campaign. Because of his dedication and hard work, we are in a great position. Our grassroots effort is strong, we have had early fundraising success and a great team has been assembled.”

Which of course explains why Goodhew was booted resigned on his own volition.

No doubt the campaign has taken a personal toll on the relatively inexperienced Goodhew, but clearly, the handwriting was on the wall. As Daniel points out, even Republican pollster Strategic Vision shows McGavick mired in a double-digit deficit, even after months of television ads. Other polls confirm McGavick’s total lack of traction.

Unless McGavick wants to dump his personal fortune into this race he’s going to have to rely on the national GOP to raise the kind of money he needs to stay competitive. But that money comes with a loss of local control, and his campaign’s poor showing thus far made a campaign shakeup inevitable. Apparently Goodhew and McGavick chose sooner rather than later.

McGavick, a former campaign manager himself (Slade Gorton, 1988) is now moving on to his third campaign manager in less than a year. Hmm. I guess he’s hoping third time will be the charm.

My day with Markos & Jerome

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Hmm. As it turns out, both Markos and Jerome are real people. Real people with Treos attached to their thumbs, but real people nonetheless.

A packed crowd of about 200 showed up at the Labor Temple last night, and a smaller group went out for drinks afterwards. Andrew has the details.

Everything went incredibly smoothly yesterday, which I guess validates the concept of a volunteer, netroots organized book tour. Kudos to Nick for organizing last night’s event, and a big thanks to the SEIU for footing the bill. (Local 775, Local 925 and District 1199NW.

I had the privilege of hearing Markos and Jerome repeat their message to a number of different audiences and respond to a variety of questions, and I was struck by how commonsense — even obvious — some of their criticism of the Democratic Party really is. Crashing the Gate may be an intentionally provocative title, but my hope is that if party officials read the book and take the criticism constructively, that gate will swing wide open, and they will welcome the help of the netroots in revitalizing our party.

As both Jerome and Markos pointed out repeatedly, the Republicans have all these huge infrastructure advantages… and yet they just barely win. It won’t happen overnight, but if we can manage to overcome the institutional inertia and shove our party into the 21st century, we really can achieve a Democratic majority.

UPDATE:
Fixed the post to recognize all the SEIU locals who supported the event. My apologies.

Crashing the Gate… today!

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Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of Daily Kos fame, and his co-author Jerome Armstrong of MyDD will be in town this week promoting their new book, “Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People Powered Politics.”

Please join me tonight in welcoming Markos and Jerome to Seattle:

Friday, April 7th, 7:00 p.m.
Seattle Labor Temple
2800 1st Ave, Hall 1
Seattle

There will be a discussion, Q&A, and book signing, open to the general public and the media. Think of it as a very special edition of Drinking Liberally… but without the drinking. (Though expect there will be some of that afterwards.)

If you can’t make it tonight, there will be to more opportunities tomorrow (Saturday, April 8th) to meet the authors:

11:30 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.
Marymoor Park
6046 West Lake Sammamish Pkwy NE
Redmond

7:00 p.m.
Orca Books
509 E 4th Ave
Olympia

Again, all the events are open to the public, no reservations needed, so please come out and show your support for Markos and Jerome, and the tremendous work they are doing in building the netroots and transforming the Democratic Party.

NOTE:
I’m out playing the role of “publicity flak for a day,” so consider this one and only post an open thread. There will be media availability at all three events, so if you are a journalist looking for some one-on-one, please contact me, or just show up and we’ll do our best to accommodate you.

Mike McGavick not “a number of positions”

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… Or so Carl says:

My first revelation is that McGavick seems to have made up his title. His bio page on his website says, “Prior to joining Safeco, Mike held a number of positions at Chicago-based CNA Financial Corporation starting in 1995.” Yet from my “research” I’ve discovered that there was no position called “a number of positions.” This is as disturbing as I am phony.

Second, where’s the formality? The page keeps calling him “Mike.” He’s a man who keeps kicking off his run for the Senate. You’d think Mr. McGavick would be more appropriate. But no, it’s Mike this and Mike that. He has no sense of the importance of the Senate! Did he tell his underlings at CNA financial to call him Mike when he was a “number of positions,” or is a sense of decorum something that you leave behind to the corporate world?

Finally, does he eat babies? The 8 paragraph bio he wrote didn’t mention it one way or the other. If he’d really never eaten a baby, why not mention it in the bio? Is there a history of baby eating? Does he know any baby eaters? Does he eat them raw or at least have the decency to cook the babies he eats? Are you too stupid to figure out that I haven’t answered the baby eating question, and instead just put a bunch of silly questions?

‘Nuff said.

Daily open thread

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Apparently, some of my readers would like to discuss Darcy Burner’s law school grades. Good idea:

Contract law: A-
Torts: A-
Civil Procedure: A-
Basic Legal Skills: A
Property law: A
Criminal law: A
Constitutional law: A

Hmm. We all know Darcy’s smart, but it takes a lot of hard work to get grades like that at a top law school like the UW.

Stefan Sharkansky: all rake and no muck

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Looks like the Reichert folk are starting to feel the heat from Darcy Burner, whose campaign to unseat the first term, 8th Congressional District Republican just jumped into the national spotlight with a spectacular first quarter fundraising report. Burner out-raised Reichert two-to-one during the quarter, including an impressive $90,000 in the final two days of the reporting period… and her $536,000 total is more than any Democrat has ever raised at this point in any 8th CD race. Ever.

Up until now the standard GOP response to Burner has been to merely dismiss her as a novice and a political lightweight… but no more. Local Republicans are nervous, and you can see it in the rhetorical beads of sweat dripping off the knotted brows of our good friend Stefan over at (un)Sound Politics.

Sounding like a pale imitation of, well… me… Stefan set out yesterday to strike a deadly blow against the surging Burner campaign, but the only damage he managed to inflict was to his own, already battered and bruised credibility.

Stefan makes three charges against Burner, that 1) she has inflated her resume by claiming to be a “former Microsoft executive;” 2) that she’s neither a regular voter nor involved in her community, and 3) that there are “funny inconsistensies” [sic] in her “stories” about leaving Microsoft.

Gee. Going after inflated resumes and sparse voting records. I wonder where Stefan got that idea? What… he couldn’t find any mother beating or horse associations in her background?

From the way Stefan thematically borrowed from some of my better known scoops, one might think I was as much his target as Burner. And ordinarily I’d be flattered by such mimicry… that is, if Stefan hadn’t done such a crappy job of it. I take great pride in my muckraking — in both its accuracy and its impact — and as the local blogosphere’s most effective practitioner of the art, I’ve got a bit of advice: good muckraking requires more than just a good rake, Stefan. You also need to find a little, um… you know… muck.

Indeed, Stefan’s fanciful essay was so thin on fact and so thick on conjecture, it’s really not even worth refuting. But he and I have a special sort of personal bond, and I wouldn’t want to hurt his feelings by withholding my critique… so let’s take his fantasies in numerical order. Stefan writes:

Burner is inflating her resume. Burner’s campaign and supporters in the media call her a “former Microsoft executive”. This is an enormous exaggeration. She was not any kind of “executive”, a term customarily applied only to the most senior company officials…

Oh please.

Burner uses the word “executive” in the little “e” generic sense to describe her role at Microsoft to the general public. What did she do there? She managed a multimillion dollar budget. She managed managers and oversaw an entire team of employees. She worked with businesses from all over the world to help them benefit from Microsoft’s technology. So was she an “executive”…?

ex

Daily open thread

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Oh man… there’s so much to talk about:

Crashing the Gate tour comes to Seattle

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Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of Daily Kos fame, and his co-author Jerome Armstrong of MyDD will be in town this week promoting their new book, “Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People Powered Politics.”

Two events have been scheduled and they’re open to the public:

Friday, April 7th, 7:00 p.m.
Seattle Labor Temple
2800 1st Ave, Hall 1
Seattle

Saturday, April 8th, 11:30 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.
Marymoor Park
6046 West Lake Sammamish Pkwy NE
Redmond

Markos and Jerome will talk about their new book and do the book signing thing. This is a great opportunity to meet two national figures who are changing the face of grassroots politics… plus show to them the enormous enthusiasm of our own local, liberal “netroots.” I hope to see you all there.

MEDIA ADVISORY:
I’m the volunteer publicity flak for this event, so if you want to arrange some one-on-one time with the authors, please contact me. Friday is tight, but there’s still some room on Saturday. There’s also an event down in Olympia on Saturday evening, the details of which are just now being set.

Podcasting Liberally… with Darcy Burner

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Our producers Gavin & Richard (you know, the guys with the portable recording studio) are out galavanting through Europe, so we weren’t expecting to record a podcast this week… until Bruno & the Professor gallantly rode in on their white steeds to save the day. The result is a very special edition of Podcasting Liberally, not just because it’s a bit noisier, but because I also conducted a special one-on-one interview with WA’s 8th Congressional District candidate Darcy Burner.

Darcy tells me about the really big fundraising week she had, thanks in part to an outpouring of grassroots (and netroots) support, and then we talk about why she really is the perfect candidate to represent the working class families in her district. (She really is.) Afterwards, regulars Carl, Mollie and Will join me, Bruno, and of course, the Professor, in a round of our usual witty banter. Topics include the fucking language police at (u)SP, Tom DeLay and the imminent GOP collapse, Matt Rosenberg’s superior writing skills, and why Mollie and I are offended by people who hate atheists.

The show is 48:31, and is available here as a 34.3 MB MP3. Please visit PodcastingLiberally.com for complete archives and RSS feeds.

[Recorded live at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally.]

Maria Cantwell is not pro-war

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In today’s column, the Seattle P-I’s Joel Connelly writes about the reader response to his previous broad defense of Sen. Maria Cantwell. While he says the response was mixed, he excerpts quite a few vitriolic letters from the anti-Cantwell camp.

In reading through Connelly’s column I think it becomes clear that the most fervent Cantwell haters are operating under two basic misconceptions, that a) engineering a Cantwell defeat will somehow pull the Democratic Party further to the left, and b) that Cantwell is actually pro-war.

Connelly correctly concludes that to Cantwell’s fiercest critics, her Iraq war authorization vote and her failure thus far to recant it, trump all other issues. But I agree wholeheartedly that there are other issues — like global warming — with a far greater impact on a far larger number of people. Yet while Cantwell has been one of the Senate’s most outspoken and effective leaders on energy and the environment, she continues to be vilified by some on the left.

This prompted one of Cantwell’s supporters to ask, “What are these people thinking?”

A clue was provided in an e-mail entitled “Progressives MUST defeat Cantwell” from reader Donald Suppner.

“Cantwell is Lieberman Lite,” he wrote.

“One more DLC (Democratic Leadership Council) corporate whore.”

Alluding to the Green Party’s candidate, Suppner added: “If progressives vote for Aaron Dixon in numbers that would have elected Cantwell, and the D.C. Dems fall one seat short of taking the Senate, THEN the cowardly Dem politicians will realize that they MUST deal with our issues. It worked for the right-wing religious perverts. Bushco kisses their feet on cue.”

Uh-huh.

See, the problem is, people like Suppner have it backwards. The “right-wing religious perverts” have influence within the GOP far exceeding their strength in numbers because they helped Republicans seize power, not because they threatened to undermine them. Indeed, at the national level, the theocrats essentially seized control of the Republican Party by working from within.

Compare that to Ralph Nader and the Green Party’s success in pulling the Democrats to the left by handing the White House to Bush. How’s that goin’ for you?

(And let’s be blunt: while there were many other factors, Al Gore would have won in 2000 if not for Nader. So all you unrepentant Naderites out there should be blaming yourselves for the Iraq war, not Cantwell.)

In short, you want to make the Democrats more progressive? Make yourself an indispensable part of Democratic success. That’s what me and my fellow progressive bloggers are in the process of doing.

But all that strategery stuff aside, I’m convinced that the most vitriolic Cantwell critics are all talking out of their asses when they attempt to portray her as a hawkish war monger.

Yes, Cantwell voted for the Iraq war authorization… as did most of the Democratic leadership. And no, she has not stood up and given a mea culpa asking for our forgiveness.

But neither is she a defender of the Bush administration’s war policy.

The truth is, she’s actually said relatively little publicly about the war, and what she has said has admittedly been rather muddled. It is easy for those of us on the left or the right to view the war with all the clarity of a passionate ideologue, but my guess is that like the majority of Americans (and the majority of Washingtonians she directly represents,) Cantwell is genuinely conflicted about the war and the best way to extract our nation from it, while honoring our commitments to both the Iraqi people and our own troops.

It is easy for me to condemn President Bush for lying to the American public and the world in selling his cynical, misguided war, and for the incompetent, immoral, and ultimately disastrous way he has conducted it. But I’m not a U.S. Senator. I don’t have to worry about how my public statements will be interpreted by our allies and enemies abroad, or about what impact they may have on the morale of our troops and their families. Cantwell does.

I don’t know if Cantwell does or does not regret her vote for authorization, and I’m not sure she’ll ever come out and tell us. But either way, she can’t take back that vote, and her actions and words in its aftermath must now be calculated to make the best of a very bad situation.

You and I can rail against the war all we want — and we should — but we don’t have to look a soldier’s mother in eye and tell her that her son died in vain.

There are no simple solutions to the war in Iraq, and I don’t expect any from Cantwell. But what I do know is that I’d rather have Cantwell and a Democratic majority in the Senate providing a check and balance on the Bush administration, than yet another Republican rubber stamp like McGavick.

Darcy Burner blows past fundraising targets, raises $536,000!

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8th Congressional District candidate Darcy Burner blew past her fundraising targets with an impressive surge during the final few days of the first-quarter reporting period.

Burner will report over $536,000 raised thus far, $320,000 in the last quarter. More important, her $355,000 in cash-on-hand comfortably beat the threshold required to qualify for $250,000 from the DCCC’s Red-to-Blue program.

But perhaps most impressive was the way in which she exceeded her targets, raising over $150,000 in the last ten days, and an astounding $90,000 in the final 48 hours of the quarter.

The campaign credits much of this fundraising surge to the grassroots support Burner received from local bloggers, and if that’s true, we not only helped her campaign reach “the next level” as campaign manager Zach Silk told The Stranger, but such an impact would suggest that the local progressive blogosphere has reached the next level itself.

We’ve got a competitive race, my friends. More later….

In the meantime, stop by Drinking Liberally tonight and meet the candidate herself; 8pm, Montlake Alehouse, 2307 24th Avenue E.

Daily open thread

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Writing in Vanity Fair, Michael Wolff describes White House press secretary Scott McClellan:

He’s Piggy in Lord of the Flies: a living victim, whose reason for being is, apparently, to shoulder public ridicule and pain (or, come to think of it, he’s Squealer from Animal Farm). He’s the person nobody would ever choose to be.

Great piece. Gosh, I love Vanity Fair.

Drinking Liberally… with Darcy Burner

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The Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally meets tonight (and every Tuesday), 8PM at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E.

Joining us tonight will be the next congressperson from Washington’s 8th Congressional District, Darcy Burner, who has some exciting news to share about her first-quarter fundraising totals, and the role the “netroots” played in helping her exceed her target. Burner campaign manager Zach Silk told The Stranger’s Eli Sanders that “the blogosphere was instrumental in taking us to the next level,” and she’s coming to DL to thank us all personally.

Unfortunately, Burner won’t be able to join us on our weekly podcast, because producers Gavin and Richard have fled to Europe. So unless some kind-hearted stranger stops by with a shit-load of recording equipment, Podcasting Liberally is on a one-week hiatus.

In other DL news, our host Nicholas Beaudrot is offering free beer to volunteers with a high-powered staplegun willing to post up flyers promoting this weekend’s Seattle area stop on Markos & Jerome’s “Crashing the Gate” book tour. (FYI: Friday April 7, 7-9 pm at the Seattle Labor Temple, 2800 1st AVE, and Saturday April 8, 11:30am-2pm at Marymoor Park.) And of course, for those of you on the other side of the mountains, please join Jimmy at the Tri-Cities chapter of DL, every Tuesday from 5:30 onwards, Tuscany Lounge, 1515 George Washington Way, Richland.

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