We fight, even against insurmountable odds, because sometimes we win.
As I get ready to head to Copenhagen this Saturday for the international climate negotiations, I'm thrilled to see the success of The Leadership Campaign and their efforts to have Massachusetts use 100% clean electricity by 2020.
On Monday, Representative William Brownsberger will file their bill, An Act to Re-power Massachusetts, in the Massachusetts House, calling on Gov. Deval Patrick to create a task force to formulate a plan to get Massachusetts to100% clean electricity by 2020.
Next up in the series on the upcoming Obama cabinet: Who would make the best Attorney General? For me, that would be the person best qualified to dismantle the so-called PATRIOT act. For others, it may be someone motivated to bring at least a few of the players from the current Bush White House to justice.
Myself, I wouldn't mind a surprise here - say someone like WA Gov Christine Gregoire. She was the lead AG in the first of the major tobacco "settlements".
To some extent, every D state AG might be considered. So I can't have an unlimited list. The poll includes an option for "Someone Else," plus a request to specify in the comments.
Once again, poll and brief description of each candidate on the flip. I evaluate each option as best I can. (I had to research the credentials of a few.) I trust others will add more data, including why others would be great or awful. I may have missed a few excellent candidates, so please feel free to add your own.
Since this is my week of getting stuff wrong, I'll come clean on some other observations. I've been following the new Northeastern governors - Deval Patrick, Jon Corzine, and Eliot Spitzer - as potential models of progressive governance. Corzine is managing to hang in there, though there is grumbling, but Patrick and Spitzer are disappointments. Patrick's administration seems unfocused and excessively business-friendly, seeking to bring in more gambling. I thought Spitzer would recover from his Bruno fight, and he did, but he failed to fix his political operation and smacked himself in the face on his clumsy immigration proposal.
The charts below just came out, and it shows that Spitzer has a negative approval rating among Democrats. He could turn this around, but he didn't do it after the Bruno fight. Maybe he'll learn now.
Last night, Deval Patrick and Hillary Bill Clinton held a rally for Niki Tsongas. Patrick had some choice words on the blurring strategy, which you can watch in this video:
Here are the passages that really caught my attention (emphasis mine):
But the change, the change has got to come from us, because we, regularly political people of every political background, keep falling for what Republicans say, and not holding them accountable for what they do.
There is a great deal at stake in this election, but if you listen closely to the two candidates, to the substance, they will sometimes sound a lot alike. And that's because if you are a Republican today in Washington, or rather if you are a Republican running to go to Washington, you run as fast as possible from away from the administration in Washington, and you try to blur the difference between that administration and Democratic principles and ideals.(…)
They both say, I've heard them both say, that they want an end to the war in Iraq, but one candidate wants to keep the troops there indefinitely. Does that sound like an end to the war in Iraq to you? And the other candidate, our candidate, is ready to make that hard call now.
In a funny way, both candidates sound like Democrats, but only one candidate is one. Only one is one, and that candidate is Niki Tsongas.
This is a great speech for Tsongas by Patrick, and it shows he really gets what is going on in terms of Iraq and electoral politics. Given that Hillary Bill Clinton was also at the event, I hope he has a chance to repeat the emphasized passage to Bill, and ask him to give the message to his wife. Hillary Clinton has still not said when she will pull all of the non-embassy troops out, and 2013 is apparently too early. To paraphrase what Deval Parick said, keeping troops in Iraq indefinitely does not sound like an end of the war to me.
Ugh, I hate dealing with stupid and clumsy smear campaigns, but it's got to be done. This ignorant article is being circulated among right-wing bloggers purporting to find deep questions about Spitzer's campaign operation.
Just since the first of this year, Spitzer 2010 has taken in $5.6 million and spent $4.2 million on a campaign that doesn't officially start for at least two years. Among the largest reported Spitzer 2010 expenditures to date are payments totaling $3,161,112 to Global Strategy Group, a media consultant group, for "TV ads."
The wingnuts are asking why, if Spitzer is up for reelection in 2010, would he be collecting money this early. The answer takes a passing familiarity with New York politics; Spitzer spent $3 million plus in an ad war with SEIU over health care plans. The wingnutosphere has woken up and finally started grabbing onto the toenail clippings of this scandal, milking every last headline in what is rapidly becoming a show trial. Meanwhile, Spitzer keeps doing stuff like allocating more money for affordable housing and working to enroll more kids in the health plus program. Ack, these right-wing freaks are just awful.
Meanwhile, the wingnuts are also out to get the New York Times's excellent Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse, concocting a fake scandal about her not wanting to appear on C-Span. This one's much stupider than the Spitzer smear. Spitzer's problems are at least a result of his administration's own mistakes, both ethical and political. This is just Linda Greenhouse not being told that C-Span was going to film a panel, and when she arrived at that panel, saying she would not be as comfortable expressing herself to a nationally televised audience as an intimate group of journalism professors. That's literally the 'controversy'. Slate has a rundown, as does the AEJMC forum.
I know and like Greenhouse and I like her reporting. She's accurate and passionate, which is probably why the right is going after her. Anyway, it's just important to get it on the record that she's being unfairly attacked.
Again, right-wing smear campaigns are really really irritating, often because the accusations are so stupid as to make them hard to rebut. You mean there was a controversy about C-Span cameras? No, there had to be more, right? No, in fact, there is nothing else here, except a right-wing witchhunt. Ack, these people are just freaks.
What's been going on for weeks in New York state is part of the standard conservative 'kill them in the crib' strategy of destroying progressive icons and politicians. In this case, the target is rising progressive star Eliot Spitzer. Spitzer is considered especially dangerous to the right-wing, because he's a real populist who has taken on Wall Street in extremely high profile cases. He was so effective that a few years ago, the corrupt US Chamber of Commerce declared a 'war on Spitzerism' to reign in state attorney general officers that sought to aggressively enforce the law against corporate elites. The scandal that's taking place now, while ostensibly caused by Spitzer's mistakes, has more to do with these established enemies of populism combined with a peculiar set of incentives for local politicians and insider journalists in New York to pile on an anti-Spitzer frenzy.
Anyway, what happened today is that the Republicans themselves in the state Senate publicly investigated the behavior of the Spitzer administration, even though nonpartisan agencies with more credibility are already looking into what happened. There is no reason for state Senate leader Joe Bruno to be doing this except vengeance and the desire to drag out a scandal and prevent an investigation of Bruno's own corruption, as Rochester Turning notes (though perhaps Bruno just loves the attention, having preened around on national TV for days now).
Meanwhile, New Yorkers and leaders in the state are beginning to ask the government to, well, get back to work. Stuart Appelbaum, of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, is asking the state Senate to pass paid family leave and expand access to health care instead of engaging in these investigations. Both policies are Spitzer priorities. Spitzer himself is actually still governing, working to review and fix New York City's subway system that broke down simply due to thunderstorms. As the Cunning Realist put it, the 'Bloomberg is off the rose'. Having progressives govern makes a difference; years of Giuliani and Bloomberg in the Mayoral seat has of course led to decaying infrastructure, because cross-dressers or not, they are Republicans and Republicans cannot govern.
Many of us have become jaded by a lack of accountability by our politicians at the top, and so the notion that 'getting something done' should take precedence over grandstanding investigations sounds like spin. But in this case, it's not. Every day, I get an email from Michael Caputo of NYFacts.net bashing Eliot Spitzer, and Caputo is a former aide to George H.W. Bush, well-established in right-wing orbits, and obviously directing a smear campaign.
This is really a collection of insiders, press people, angry coddled legislators, Joe Bruno and right-wingers trying to destroy Eliot Spitzer's capacity to govern New York. They tried it with Deval Patrick in Massachusetts and Jon Corzine in New Jersey, and they'll try it with every progressive who takes on a political machine. In some ways, this is exactly what the right did in impeaching Bill Clinton, using Clinton's sloppiness and mistakes to try to overturn a popular electoral result. Destroying progressives is what the right does well, and it's in fact the only thing the right does well. This time, it's not going to work, since there are already investigations going on that are not grounded in Republican partisanship, the scandal has been on every paper in the state for weeks, and yet Spitzer is still pretty popular.
More than that, the public is paying attention and isn't falling for it. They are seeing, with the collapse of infrastructure in Minnesota and New York City, that people in government actually do have stuff to do.
I've been following the Spitzer nonsense in New York. Basically, Spitzer made a mistake, took a hit in the polls to a 48-28 approval rating (as if that's bad), but his archenemy Joe Bruno is immensely unpopular, at 33-40 approve/disapprove.
The state Senate Republicans are going to hold a hearing today to dig into Spitzer, so we'll see how aggressively Bruno goes out. Bruno's been all over the national news and the talk shows, so I can't imagine he'll be conciliatory. Nevertheless, he should be. He's deeply corrupt, and voters know it. He effectively hurt Spitzer, but he should beware of overreeach.
Despite the hyperventilating press, voters can see where the problem lies: 'Voters are more certain, 43 - 26 percent with 30 percent undecided, that further investigation will show Bruno did something wrong.'
The first post fallout polling I've seen is a mixed bag for the Governor. 62% of registered voters believe there should be further investigation and a whopping 80% think the Governor should testify. On the other hand, Spitzer's job approval has actually nudged up just a bit (from 43% to 47%) and 66% say that Spitzer "is a good leader for New York State."
Spitzer's going to be fine. Andrew Cuomo believes he should be governor, Joe Bruno hates him, Shelley Silver thinks he's a rival, and the press wants to tear Spitzer down.
I have friends in New York who think that our chances of retaking the state Senate are gone. I don't know. Eighteen months is a long time, and despite the scandals, Spitzer is actually getting a lot done as Governor.
To follow up on Chris's point, I think it's pretty simple why most major blogs aren't backing a Presidential candidate. While I like some more than others, no candidate is challenging reactionary power centers with any clarity. I haven't heard anything close to 'I don't want to listen to fundamentalist preachers anymore'.
It takes a while to grow a Presidential candidate, and Dean/Clark in 2004, though giving huge space to activists, showed that they weren't quite ready for the office. I'm keeping my eye on Senate candidates, House candidates, idea networks, and Governors like Jon Corzine, Deval Patrick, and especially Eliot Spitzer. That guy is the Bar Fight primary, and his Democratic Party, led by savvy young Party Chair Dave Pollak, has already collaborated with the blogs to win a special election on a state level. That said, there are clear obstacles to progressive victories, because all of us are kind of making it up as we go along.
For instance, I blogged this week about Governor Eliot Spitzer's obstacles learning how to govern New York. He got into a nasty fight with Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno, without enough allied support. In the past few days, he's turned that around and concluded a marathon negotiating session with Bruno and passed campaign finance reform and help for New York City to begin congestion pricing.
The Albany Project is pleased with the campaign finance reform details, and notes that SEIU 1199, a traditional supporter of Republicans in New York State, is changing its tune and contributing to freshmen Democratic State Senators. Spitzer has faced criticism for not pushing state Senate candidates in his walkover election in 2006, so I'm expecting him to get very partisan in 2008 all over the state.
One problem we're facing as a movement seeking to move the country off of a fossil fuel base is that many of our new Democratic legislative chambers have no idea what to do except bump up the minimum wage here or there. But slowly, progressives are learning to govern, and the models for governance are going to be copied all over. We ought to watch New York, because this is one critical place where those models are being developed.
If there's one figure in progressive politics who stands up and fights, publicly, for what he believes in, it's Eliot Spitzer. A friend told me he was sitting in a cafe, and he happened to overhear a conversation in which two old ladies were complaining about a credit card fee. "Call Eliawwt', said one of them in a heavy Brooklyn accent. It's safe to say that New Yorkers loved Eliot as Attorney General.
So now he's Governor, and how's he doing? Like Jon Corzine of New Jersey and Deval Patrick of Massachusetts, he's one of several progressive governors who is in really vicious and aggressive fights with entrenched interests. For Corzine, he battled South Jersey Democratic boss George Norcross over property taxes, and had his earlier affair with union leader 'Carla Katz' thrown in his face. Patrick is fighting a budget battle, taking on Beacon Hill insiders. And he had a 'scandal' where he hired a secretary for his wife thrown in his face. These two pale in comparison to the nasty contest in New York.
STATE BLOGS
