Senate Guru is on strike! What are the Guru's demands? To get the Guru back to blogging, we need to raise seven twenty-dollar bills each for red state Democratic Senate candidates Jim Martin, Jim Slattery, and Ronnie Musgrove on the Expand the Map! ActBlue page. Your Andrew Jacksons will go toward a great cause: dislodging Shameless Saxby Chambliss, Bush-cover-up-artist Pat Roberts, and ethically questionable Roger Wicker from the U.S. Senate. So, please, this weekend, send your twenties to these competitive Democrats in red states via the Expand the Map! ActBlue page and get the Guru back to blogging!
Here's the ad running against Jim Slattery, the Democratic Senate candidate in Kansas. It's a vicious attack against Slattery from Pat Roberts, who promised to run an entirely positive campaign on the issues.
That Roberts is going negative this early, and lying about his intended campaign strategy, is evidence that he is taking this challenge very seriously. If I were Roberts, I'd do the same thing, and Slattery risks being defined as a Washington lobbyist. I'm intrigued by Slattery; he's not the most progressive guy in the world, but he stood up to Reagan, Colin Powell, and the neoconservatives in the 1980s on Nicaragua.
In Kentucky, Democrat Bruce Lunsford is beginning to self-fund against Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell. McConnell is the smartest Republican operative in the Senate, so getting rid of him would go a long way toward destroying Republican cohesion. He has $9M in the bank, having raised a total of $15M so far this cycle, good rewards for a lifetime of legislating on behalf of big oil, big telecom, defense contractors, etc.
Lunsford will put huge sums of money into his race, which reduces the need to put progressive money into Kentucky. The Supreme Court, by striking down special privileges for opponents of self-funders for House candidates, might have also given Lunsford an additional boon to his race.
Kentucky is going to be a more localized race, since Obama doesn't play well there. Kansas is a place where Obama has more traction, so Slattery could hitch his wagon a bit more to the leader of the Democratic party. Both races are longshots, but a wave could help create a far more progressive Senate next year.
I spent some time with Kansas Senate candidate Jim Slattery last night, who is running against the head of the Intelligence Committee, Pat Roberts. Slattery and his campaign staff spent some time explaining that Kansas is shifting into away from the Republican Party because of the war and the economy, though it is still quite a conservative state. It's a cheap state that can be blanketed with a 30 day media blitz for around $3M, and Slattery was a long-time Congressman who is well-respected. Senate Guru calls Slattery the sleeper competitive race of 2008.
He was well-versed and passionate around progressive issues and told me he supported network neutrality (Google's definition where tiering is allowable but content discrimination is not). What impressed me was Slattery's record in Congress; he helped author the Clean Air Act and fought against Reagan's ploy to send military aid to the Contras in the 1980s. As a savvy bureaucrat, he knew that voting for aid for food and medical supplies made sense, as long as none of it was delivered "by the CIA". In going back through the archives, I'm running into people like Colin Powell, who made the case for intervening to Congress after Iran-Contra, and Eliot Abrams, who was the bureaucratic infighter for Reagan to make it happen and was damaged during the Iran-Contra hearings. It turns out that Powell's turn at the UN is not the first time he used his reputation to justify crazy interventionist policies. Weird, that.
We need people like Slattery in Congress who have the institutional memory of these conflicts. I found him impressive, and I hope he can ride the wave of people like Kathleen Sebelius and turn Kansas blue.
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