Search Results for: Reichert

What the hell is going on with Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty (R)? Has he, too, become a shameless propagandist?

Last night (Wed.) on FOX News’ Hannity and Colmes Pawlenty said:

Minnesota has a reputation of clean and fair and good elections. […] However finding 32 ballots in a trunk of a car and supposedly forgetting that they were there is suspicious.

The “32 ballots in the trunk of Minneapolis Elections Director Cindy Reichert’s car” story is a fabrication (or, a bizarre misunderstanding) by one of Sen. Norm Coleman’s lawyers.

David Brauer, a political reporter at MinnPost, documents the rumor’s origin and demise:

Reichert is all too happy to provide an explanation. She says the “car ballot” story is “just not true,” painting a picture of normal balloting procedures twisted into something grotesquely misleading.

The “car ballot” story emerged Saturday from the mouth of Coleman lawyer Fritz Knaak, who, according to AP, told reporters, “We were actually told ballots had been riding around in her car for several days, which raised all kinds of integrity questions.”

Knaak never provided a source and did not return two MinnPost calls for comment. However, he was already backing off his story at the same press event. As that day’s Pioneer Press noted, “Knaak said he feels assured that what was going on with the 32 ballots was neither wrong nor unfair.”

It’s odd that Pawlenty continues to propagate a rumor that was, essentially, retracted by the rumor’s creator on the same day it was created.

At this point, those who continue to spread the rumor are either willfully ignorant, or are happy to lie in order to “catapult the propaganda.” Which is it for Pawlenty?

Seattle Times editorial columnist Joni Balter defends her newspaper’s biased and crappy reporting on WA-08:

Not only do Northwesterners have a built-in disdain for people who name-drog [sic] fancy colleges, she should not have gotten twisted up in a dispute about a great degree.

Uh-huh.  First of all, that’s the sort of attitude one might expect from somebody who would have gone to a “fancy college,” had she been gifted enough to get in.  But more importantly… talk about blame the victim.  Darcy was totally fucked by the Times over the trivial, front page parsing of a college degree, and Joni’s defense is, well, she shouldn’t have flaunted that sexy education.

I mean, really, Joni?  Darcy deserved to have her political career destroyed over this?  That’s your analysis of the race?  This from the women who argued to my face that it was totally irresponsible for the press to report, just weeks before an election, that David Irons hit his mother?  I’m sensing a double-standard here.

To put this all in perspective, here’s a question for you Joni, and the rest our local media, which I’m guessing neither you nor colleagues have the balls to even acknowledge, let alone answer:  Did Dave Reichert catch the Green River Killer?

Come on… did he?  He sure as hell has taken credit for catching the Green River Killer… over and over and over and over and over again.  In fact, it is fair to say that he has built his entire political career on what is no doubt a shamelessly self-serving exaggeration, if not an out and out lie.

So really, how dare you attack Darcy’s credibility when you and your colleagues not only refuse to debunk the biggest lie in Washington state politics, but were actually complicit in creating and promoting this myth in the first place?

I’m just sayin’…

So maybe Darcy should complain to the Washington News Council, that supposedly objective collection of movers and shakers who have arrogated to themselves the right to decide what constitutes real journalism. They did so in the WA-08 race in 2006, when they voted thumbs down on a P-I story about the real story behind Dave Reichert’s investigation of the Green River Killer. The P-I wisely rejected their findings, but the Washington New Council got their little kangaroo court broadcast on TVW, if I recall correctly. So our tax dollars were being used against us in a bald political manner, even if it was all dressed up in legal niceties. Still waiting on the Legislative hearings asking TVW um, WTF?

Here we are two years later and the Seattle Times indisputably did a hit job on Darcy Burner, so I’m sure the Washington News Council will be all over it.

And the Washington News Council is having a nice dinner tomorrow night! You should go. Really. I bet they’ll just be outraged about what happened to Burner and can’t wait to get to the bottom of it.

Here’s the poster:

Darcy issued the following brief statement:

“It is likely at this point that Congressman Reichert has won re-election, and while we will certainly ensure that every valid vote is counted, we accept the decision of the voters.

“I would like to thank the thousands of people who put so much time and effort into the campaign, as well as the countless thousands more who went beyond voting to actively participate in our democratic process this year. The election of Barack Obama as our new President will ensure that the change to the direction of our country called for in this campaign is realized in the new year.”

I will write my own analysis later, but for the moment, I can’t disagree with Joan’s comments over at Daily Kos:

The Seattle Times spurious attack on Darcy’s character, calling her a liar because she accurately described her Harvard degree, apparently worked. So they succeeded in re-electing an already ineffective incumbent who will be even more so mired deep in the minority, with a Democratic president.

Congratulations, Emily Heffter and the Seattle Times. You just assured progress on key issues like transportation and environmental protection in the 8th District won’t have an effective proponent in the House. At least we’ve got good Senators.

I want to thank all of you here at HA who contributed so much time, money and support to Darcy during her two campaigns.  And I want to thank Darcy for dedicating four years out of her life to this cause.  I don’t know if she’ll ever serve in Congress, but I sincerely doubt that this is the last we’ve heard of Darcy Burner.

Um… it doesn’t look good.  Again, we don’t know where the ballots are coming from, or if they’re being counted in any particular temporal order, but Reichert won the last King County drop by a large margin, and it’s beginning to look like a trend.  It’s too early to concede, but unless things go substantially in Darcy’s favor in today’s count, it’ll be time to start crying in my beer.

Darcy Burner lost ground after yesterday’s ballot dumps, and now trails Dave Reichert by about 1,800 votes, with about half the ballots counted.  And of course, that’s a very discouraging trend.

That said, it may not represent a trend at all, as at the moment we have absolutely no idea where these ballots came from, either geographically or temporaly.  These could be early absentees. These could be recent arrivals.  These could be a random sample.  Your guess is as good as mine.

For those following the results from outside Washington state, it is important to remember that unlike neighboring Oregon, ballots must merely be postmarked by election day, and they’ll continue to arrive for days.  So once (if?) King and Pierce counties catch up with the ballots on hand we’ll have a much better idea of the status of this race.

Yesterday, we won nearly every race in which I was emotionally invested… the governor’s race, the statewide ballot measures, most likely Peter Goldmark, and of course, the White House.  Everything except for Darcy Burner in Washington’s 8th Congressional District.

At this point Darcy is trailing Reichert by less than one percent of the vote, but there are tons of ballots left to count, so I really can’t predict this one way or the other.  What seems clear is that Darcy did very well with the early absentees, and Reichert did very well with poll voters.  That shows a clear trend in Reichert’s favor that we can mostly attribute to the rank partisan work of the Seattle Times and their decision to assist Reichert in smearing Darcy’s educational record during the final weeks of the campaign.  And that’s simply pathetic.

That said, both camps should be very nervous right now.  Later today, and possibly tomorrow, after more early absentees are counted, Darcy will likely regain the lead… and then over the next few days, as the late absentees are added to the tally, that lead will likely slowly ebb away.  To what degree either of these predictions hold true, if at all, depends on turnout and the partisan composition of yesterday’s electorate, neither of which we know enough about yet from the ballots that have been counted in the district thus far.

What I can say in that regard is that looking at the governor’s race the statewide electorate appears to have trended at least somewhat more Democratic than the pollsters had predicted.  And that gives me reason for hope.

Hmm, it seems Darcy Burner is ahead of incumbent Republican Dave Reichert 53.13% to 46.87% as of 10:31 pm.

Burner leads in the “fake America” King County portion of the district, while Reichert holds a lead in the smaller but much more “real America” Pierce County portion.

A couple weeks ago it appeared Darcy Burner might be cruising to victory.  A number of polls showed her with a small but substantive lead amongst all voters, and a comfortable lead with those who had already cast their ballots.  And then the Seattle Times decided to step in and play kingmaker.

No doubt Dave Reichert’s bullshit “Harvard Hoax” ad, propped up by hundreds of thousands of dollars of illegal loans from his media buyer, is having an effect—Darcy’s campaign has received a number of calls from confused voters asking if Darcy actually graduated from Harvard, or even has a college degree at all.  The Times and their collaborators on talk radio took confusion over the unusual wording of Harvard degrees—essentially a niggling complaint over a lack of specificity—and knowingly gave Reichert the ammunition to lie to voters about Darcy’s extraordinary education.  And it may be working.

Essentially, if Dave Reichert wins this election, it will be a huge victory for the Seattle Times and the power of the corporate media to manipulate public opinion, and a devastating loss for those of us in the netroots who have put so much time, energy and passion into electing a qualified and competent representative in WA-08.

Please don’t let that happen.

Darcy needs our help now more than ever, and it’s time for us to leave everything on the table.  The campaign is launching a new ad today, refuting Reichert’s lies, and she needs to put every cent she can behind it to set the record straight with confused voters.  But unlike Reichert, Darcy has to pay as she goes, so if you haven’t already given everything you can, please go to Darcy’s website and contribute now.

And if you have more time than money, you can still contribute to Darcy’s campaign by volunteering today and tomorrow, knocking on doors, making phone calls, and helping with her Get Out The Vote efforts.

For the third election in a row, and with the tacit cooperation of the press, Dave Reichert is closing out his campaign by smearing his opponent.  It is time to show that people power can trump the entrenched interests of our state’s media-political complex.

I’m no great fan of Barack Obama. His election will be historic, and he will provide both an inspiration and a desperately new face for America to the world. And he’s smart and competent. That said, he’s proven his corporate centrism on far too many issues (including, most recently, his enthusiastic backing of a $700 billion that I suspect we’ll soon come to widely acknowledge as a criminal looting of the treasury) for me to be much impressed. And Joe Biden, from his whoring for credit card companies to his war on drugs mania to his disastrous plan to partition Iraq, is a neat encapsulation of what is vile about many Senate Democrats.

But it doesn’t matter. In Washington state, our electoral votes are a foregone conclusion. The presidential race is strictly a spectator sport here. And, as Darryl has been demonstrating nightly, one with a pretty much foregone conclusion.

Similarly, I’m not all that worked up about this blog’s special obsession over the past two years, Burner/Reichert. Darcy would make a great Congressperson, and Reichert is a lousy one; I really hope she wins. But it’s not my district.

Where I (and most of us) will be most affected and can make a difference is in the race that concerns me most right now: the race for governor.

Four years ago, I did not support Christine Gregoire. I found Dino Rossi repellant, but after eight years of the execrable Gary Locke, I also had no love for yet another do-nothing centrist Democrat. I wound up voting for (and publicly endorsing) the Libertarian candidate, Ruth Bennett.

Once the election dust settled (without the help of my vote), though, a funny and very rare thing happened: I was won over by a politician who did a much, much better job than I expected.

Mind you, there’s still quite a bit I don’t agree with Christine Gregoire on. (And sorry, but if we can mock Sarah Palin’s faux-folksiness, I’m also not on board with the calculated effort to rebrand “Christine” as “Chris.”) In particular, Gregoire’s handling of the Alaskan Way Viaduct controversy has been both ham-fisted and wrong. But generally, Gregoire has been exactly what Locke was not: a leader who gets things done. She’s brought the legislature to the table and helped hammer out compromises on several key contentious issues. Her fiscal and executive management of the state, contrary to Rossi’s propaganda, has been exemplary. She balanced the budget, got voter-mandated education monies funded (unlike Locke, who simply ignored the voters); she used economic good times to invest in needed expenditures that had been slashed under Locke; and she also set aside money for the inevitable slow times that are now upon us. Does anyone doubt that, if elected, Rossi would have done none of this, electing instead — just like his party’s national leaders — to use the economic good times to simply give tax breaks to the wealthy?

Gregoire also deserves credit for respecting voters — not only by getting education funded, but also (much as it galls me) by pushing for enactment of Tim Eyman’s successful measures. The contrast couldn’t be clearer: Dino Rossi has shown time and again his contempt for voters, from his flagrant violation of campaign finance laws and his idiotic party label (“prefers GOP”) deception and his cynical effort to exploit Obama’s coattails to his fantastic (in the literal sense of the word) transportation plan to his consistent efforts to avoid fessing up to policy stances, especially on social issues, that are wildly out of step with this state’s electorate.

Even so, Rossi would not be making this race close if Gregoire’s story had been told effectively. Instead, she has proven herself in two campaigns now to be as bad a CEO for her campaign as she is good as a CEO for the state. Over the last 18 months I was repeatedly assured, by people who should know, that Gregoire’s people understood that they’d run a dreadful campaign in 2004, and that it would be fixed this time. Instead. Rossi — with an able assist from this state’s ever-pliant media — has skated by on his deceptions and a blizzard of negative ads that, until recently, have mostly gone unrefuted in any meaningful sense. Rossi has been allowed to define Gregoire and set the agenda for this campaign, an almost inconceivable feat given that Gregoire’s the incumbent. Even though Rossi is, if anything, even more repellant and dishonest than he was in 2004, Gregoire’s campaign incompetence could easily cost her the election, and us a very good governor.

But every poll shows this race within polling’s margin of error — which it certainly was in 2004 — and so even though many of us have already voted, this is one race where the next 24 hours could make all the difference. Get out the vote. Talk up the governor’s race among your friends, co-workers, relatives. Don’t let Dino Rossi’s dishonest and illegal campaigning carry the day. If it does, it not only establishes an awful precedent for how statewide campaigns are to be run, but it sets us up for a long four years in our state, years in which many people will needlessly suffer from Rossi’s budget priorities. And it will cost us the best governor we’ve had in ages.

Throughout the fall of 2006 the polls showed Darcy Burner steadily closing in on Dave Reichert.  While her internal polling never showed her with a lead, several other polls showed the race within the margin of error during the final weeks, and momentum seemed to be on her side.  Even on election night, trailing by a few thousand votes, there were some experienced vote counters who projected a narrow Burner victory, with late absentee ballots shifting the race her way.

Well, it didn’t happen.  Throughout most of the district late absentees trended toward Dave Reichert, who gradually expanded his lead as votes were tallied.

In retrospect it seems clear that Burner’s momentum stalled around mid October, with the race breaking slightly toward Reichert during the final two weeks of the campaign.  No doubt there were a number of factors responsible for Reichert’s victory, but many observers credit his sexist and demeaning “job interview” ad… and the Burner campaign’s failure to adequately respond.

Will 2008 be a replay?

Once again Burner closed sharply on Reichert, with several polls showing her with a small but significant lead by mid October.  And once again the Reichert campaign has attempted to swing the race his way with a demeaning and dishonest ad.

No doubt the “Harvard Hoax” ad is effective; there is plenty of anecdotal evidence suggesting that many viewers come away believing that Burner never earned a degree from Harvard at all.  But this time the Burner campaign has directly responded with an ad of its own, calling Reichert’s lies “pathetic”, and assuring voters that she did indeed graduate from Harvard.

But perhaps the real game changer this election season is the diminishing opportunity for a game changing ad at all, when viewed in the context of the unprecedented torrent of negative advertising that has flooded our airwaves in recent weeks… much of it courtesy of the $7 million the BIAW and RGA dumped into the governor’s race at the last minute.

In the context of this tidal wave of negativity, the “Havard Hoax” ad comes across as just another ripple… just another attack ad lost in the deafening roar of a sea of attack ads.  Add to that the general distraction of the presidential race, and it becomes harder and harder for any one political ad to make a difference.  Even the NRCC’s predictably effective “she’s gonna raise your taxes” ads get lost in the noise of “she’s gonna raise your taxes” ads launched against Gov. Gregoire.

“Yeah, we know already…” the vast majority of voters must be screaming to themselves, “She’s a Democrat.  She’s going to raise our taxes.  We get it.”  Who exactly “she” is, and in what race, well, what’s the difference?

Compare that to the 2006 cycle, when the biggest race on the ticket, Cantwell vs. McGavick, had already effectively been over for weeks, and McGavick shifted toward softer ads to preserve his reputation.  In that context the job interview ad could stand out.  In 2008… well… not so much.

I’m not claiming victory or anything, or making any predictions, but I do think it reasonable to suppose that Reichert has faced a much greater challenge this year in his efforts to close out the campaign trashing Burner’s character and reputation.  And for that, the BIAW and RGA’s seemingly bottomless warchest deserves at least some of the credit.

Just a few minutes ago on KUOW’s The Conversation, Seattle Times editorial board member Joni Balter kvelled over her paper’s editorial independence and quirkiness, boasting:

“You’d have to open our paper to figure out who we are going to endorse.”

Uh-huh.  And yet, back on September 21, I accurately predicted the Times’ endorsement in every single contested federal and statewide race:

As expected, the Seattle Times editorial board has endorsed Barack Obama for President of the United States, paving the way for endorsements of Republicans Dino Rossi, Rob McKenna, Sam Reed, Allan Martin, Dave Reichert and Cathy McMorris Rodgers, all the while leaving their vaunted bipartisan principles intact.  At least, in their own minds.

In fact, with the possible exception of the race for Commissioner of Public Lands, I can’t imagine a single additional closely contested statewide or federal race in WA state in which the Times endorses a Democrat.

So if your ed board is so unpredictable, Joni, how do you explain my prediction?

The podcast begins in the WA-08 congressional district, where some journalists and a lot of Republicans don’t seem to understand academic degrees and terminology. A Harvard graduate clears matters up. From degrees to convictions…the panel scrutinizes Rep. Dave Reichert’s illegal campaign loan. Next they examine “G.O.P. Party” candidate Dino Rossi’s deposition over campaign finance law violations. (Oh…that sound you hear? It’s the gnashing of Republican teeth across the state). After a brief sojourn into presidential politics, the panel revisits the strange case of Alaska’s Uncle Ted Stevens seven traffic tickets felony convictions. The podcast closes with panelist’s predictions for the WA-08 and the gubernatorial races.

Goldy was joined by Matt Stoller of OpenLeft, Seattle P-I columnist Joel Connelly, Publisher of the Group News Blog, Jesse Wendel, and initiative specialist Laura McClintock of McClintock Consulting.

The show is 51:36, and is available here as an MP3:

[audio:http://www.podcastingliberally.com/podcasts/podcasting_liberally_oct_28_2008.mp3]

[Recorded live at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. Special thanks to Confab creators Gavin and Richard for hosting podcasting liberally.]