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A liberal political group just made it a whole lot easier for a right-wing teabag nut to snatch away a congressional seat from under our eyes in liberal Seattle. The seat has been held by a liberal Democrat since 1999, but with redistricting it is considered a swing district now.
An attack mailing provides ammunition for the Republicans in the general election this November. Hey guys, did you forget that Congress is up for grabs? Democrats will never take back Congress if liberals attack each other this way.
Five Democrats are vying for the seat against a far-right Republican and an independent. The winner will replace Jay Inslee, who resigned in March to focus on a tough race for Washington governor.
–Suzan DelBene, a former Microsoft executive, has the endorsement of outgoing Gov. Christine Gregoire; DelBene previously ran for Congress unsuccessfully in a different district before redistricting.
–Darcy Burner, who leads the Democrats in the polls, also lost a previous race for Congress before redistricting. She headed a progressive organization.
–Laura Ruderman served in the Washington state legislature and lost a race for state attorney general.
–Steve Hobbs, a state legislator, touts his experience as being able to work well with Republicans. This won him the endorsement of the Seattle Times, which also endorsed Republican Attorney General Rob McKenna this year and George W. Bush in the past.
An immigrant businessman with no political experience is given little chance of prevailing.
Whoever wins the Aug. 7 primary will face Republican John Koster, who lost a previous election for Congress before redistricting. Koster, a religious right robot, has predictable positions on family planning, marriage equality, health care, energy, gun rights, and taxation. He aligns perfectly with people in Utah or Mississippi, not lefty Seattle.
A mailing from the shadowy Progress for Washington told voters “Nearly every business Suzan DelBene ran eventually failed.” The mailer made DelBene look as if she ran Bain Capital with Mitt Romney. If DelBene wins the nomination, you can bet Koster and his deep-pocket backers will use this attack mailing to their benefit.
Local news reports describe Progress for Washington as being headed by Jeremy Pemble, a contributor to Ruderman’s campaign. Ruderman told me, “I don’t know anything about this. I have been very clear in the press that whichever Democrat comes out of the primary can’t be bloodied and broken.”
Now it’s up to Washington state Democratic Chair Dwight Pelz to do some serious ass kicking. He and top elected Democrats in Washington need to get tough with Pemble and anyone else with lame-brained notions that will hurt Democrats this fall. President Obama is sure to take the state’s 12 electoral votes, but some state-wide races and congressional seats could flip to the Republicans. Guys like Pemble should not be helping the other side.
It’s already a tough race, and this attack makes it even tougher. The newly redrawn First Congressional District has been described as the most evenly drawn district in the state and possibly, even in the nation. After Washington was awarded a new 10th seat in the House of Representatives starting this election, a bi-partisan commission sliced and diced the existing nine districts to form the new one.
The First District now comprises suburbs to the north, east and west of Seattle and has been represented by Democrats and moderate Republicans for decades. Redistricting, however, drastically changed the geographical configuration starting in this year’s election. The First still includes some suburbs of liberal Seattle, but also reaches all the way to the Canadian border to include Bellingham and rural, conservative inland areas.
Polls show Koster with the support of 46 percent of voters in the district going into the primary, far more than any of the Democrats. If Koster looks to be within reach after the primary, outside groups funded by the Koch Brothers and Karl Rove will surely pour money into the district to swing the fall election.
A filing with the Federal Election Commission said that Progress for Washington spent $21,328 on the DelBene attack mailing. They sure fooled me. When I first saw it, I thought it was funded by a right-wing Political Action Committee, because they are the clear beneficiaries.
John Wright is the author of “The Obama Haters: Behind the Right-Wing Campaign of Lies, Innuendo & Racism” and co-author of “Life Without Oil: Why We Must Shift to a New Energy Future.”
16 Comments
Accept no imitations! Only genuine Dem corporatists can sell your birthrights away to the plutocrats with a smile!
Outstanding!
Yeah, with self-proclaimed proggy Dems selling us out by the bushelfull, the threat of another tea Partier in Congress isn’t so scary.
Who is making it easier for a teabagger to get elected? The liberal group or the party machine who insists that a corporatist Democrat must be the candidate? DelBene isn’t the kind of Democrat anyone should support, if the Democrats can’t elect someone who will represent more than just corporate interests then f’em.
So we can have a congress even worse than what we have now?
Isn’t there some point at which degrees of horrid don’t really matter, Phoenix Woman?
At least the Tea Party candidates are more honest about their policy positions.
Yeah somehow overt ideological regressives are less ummm… irritating than slimy pseudo-progressives who have no ideology other than doing whatever their self interest and their supervillain corporate donors order them to. Teabaggers, at least the crazier ones, are wrong on almost everything but they appear to have actual principles- something hypocritical mainstream corporate Democrats who feign progressivity lack.
I’ll take a nutty Paulista for instance over a slick, two faced DNC/Obama Democrat.
AS previous commenters have made clear with various degrees of gentility,all democrats are not created equal. Your descriptions of the candidates does little to distinguish between them.
Is there an actual liberal or progressive among them or are they a pack of blue dogs chewing on each other.
They are a pack of blue dogs. They are everything we’re afraid they’d be. IMHO, as a Wa. voter.
“Lefty” Seattle? I never got that impression when I lived there, although I did work in the Libertarian Eastside.
Visualize Ballard!
What’s the difference between a Tea Party Republican and a Democrat? The party registration and occasionally nicer rhetoric.
There are exceptions–but at this point they’re too few to count for very much.
In other words, so what? This isn’t the ‘liberal’ group’s fault for running an ad against a Democrat; this is the democrats’ fault for not sufficiently distinguishing themselves from republicans.
I does my heart good to read the comments of those not loyal to a Democratic Party proven to be disloyal to its progressive members.
It saddens me to read an article that ignores the fact that both major political parties, Tweedledum and Tweedledumber, are corporate slaves and sell themselves for corporate cash.
“… a Democratic Party proven to be disloyal to its progressive members.”
I don’t expect the party to be loyal to me. I recognize that it would be difficult for any political party to capture my political views in total.
I do expect a political party to be loyal to its own written party platform. How else can I distinguish one from the other.
The democratic party has become so incoherent that I really have no clue what it stands for, if anything.
People, we have to disabuse ourselves of the obviously foolish notion that the republicans and democrats are fighting each other.
They are not fighting with each other, they are cooperating in fighting us.
Both parties, and by extension our government, are comprised entirely of the pre-approved, fully vetted representatives of the ruling 1%, and to the extent that we fail to understand this, we are, and will remain foolishly chasing our own tails.
The amount of money spent reinforcing the illusion of opposing parties is near unimaginable, and should be taken as proof that the illusion is both the central reality of contemporary American politics, and is fragile enough to cause concern among our ruling class such that no expense will be spared in its maintenance.
One of the most effective techniques by which we are led to misunderstand our predicament is the encouragement we inevitably find in the media for our various complaints against ‘the other party’.
There is no ‘other party’, there is no loyal opposition, there is only a near perfect unity in action by the ruling 1% in furtherance of their continued criminal activity.
The sooner we leave behind the whole notion that we are actually ‘constituents’ of one of these
criminal groups‘parties, or the other, the sooner we’ll see a path of action worthy of our efforts.I want to know more about Progress for Washington. Who says they’re a progressive group? They sound like another front group for some slime with money and a personal agenda. Here’s what I could find in a quick search: http://www.opensecrets.org/usearch/index.php?q=Progress+for+Washington&cx=010677907462955562473%3Anlldkv0jvam&cof=FORID%3A11&searchButt_clean.x=0&searchButt_clean.y=0
Not much, really. There are more hits for Jeremy Pemble. He does seem to have a grudge with DelBene because that’s where his forty something thousand dollar anti ad money went.
Laura Ruderman is interesting. http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2018536302_ruderman27m.html She has an office holder record to look at. Just on background, she’d probably be at the top of my major party list.
Interesting that the diarist is MIA for two days.
Recommended purely in the interest of exposing his (and others’) lesser-evilist lunacy.
Bingo!
DW