Call It A Comeback
Apparently a highly qualified pilot didn’t receive an interview to be a state pilot for Blagojevich and others. While I find the hiring issues very disturbing if predictable, it seems the guy who has the most to gain by hiring a less qualified pilot for the Governor is Pat Quinn.
Most disturbingly, it didn’t help.
Remember the Blagojevich staff posting pro-Oberweis comments?
Alexi’s father passed away and that’s far more important than a race for Treasurer. I’ll take a break from that race for a few days.
Radogno is temporarily suspending campaigning as well.
Knowing he had only a 90- day window to gather the required 14,000 signatures with a small group of volunteers, Scheurer sought help. He said a consultant who identified himself with a business card as Anthony R. Constantine, owner of AR Consulting, approached him last month and offered to collect up to 10,000 signatures at $2 per signature.
No contract was signed and no money was paid up front, as is typically done in politics. Scheurer, who ran as a Democrat against Bean in the 2004 primary, admitted to being a bit politically naive and said he didn?t conduct a background check because he was afraid of scaring off the consultant or revealing too much information about his own campaign
Even if the guy had turned in signatures, I’d virtually guarantee they would have been invalid.
Trusting some clown who shows up with a business card gets you exactly where Scheuer is. No where.
Going back to Jeff, the number of idiots who come up and say they are going to do this or that is astounding and they make just this kind of promise all the time. Jeff smiles and says thanks and then runs the actual campaign.
This entire meme has taken on a life of it’s own and I even checked with his Senate office some time ago trying to figure out where it started.
HE DIDN’T VOTE FOR THE BANKRUPTCY BILL
He voted for the Leahy amendment, the Akaka AmendmentS, the Kennedy AmendmentS, The Dodd Amendment, the Boxer Amendment, the Harkin Amendment, the Durbin AmendmentS, the Feingold AmendmentS, the Schumer Amendment, the Rockefeller Amendment, the Nelson Amendment, the Corzine Amendment,
He voted against cloture on the bill (IOW, to support a filibuster).
The only amendment he voted against that progressive would generally support is the limit on interest rates introduced by Dayton. It was rejected with 74 votes against including several Democrats who were generally against the broader bill. The text of the Dayton amendment seemed to be far broader than just about credit cards and preempts state ursury laws. I’d hardly call voting against it as rejection of such a rule in general.
By all accounts, he’d support a cap in a better written amendment–and Durbin voted against the Amendment as well.
I bring this up because Austin Mayor brought it up, but the more general issue is that somehow on the blogs people have misrepresented this vote since it occurred.
In terms of the other votes, he argued the same exact position Feingold did for a far worse vote in my opinion, confirming John Ashcroft. Feingold did the same thing on Rice. Only 13 voted against her in total.
While I already addressed the class action bill, I think there is a real problem with having class action suits consistently in state courts when the issues are interstate commerce. This is a key reason we have federal courts is to deal with issues that cross state boundaries.
Looking at Progressive Punch, he has the sixth most liberal voting record with only Durbin, Boxer, Kennedy, Reed and Sarbanes with more liberal records.
What do progressive want?
Of two local elections he weighed in on, he carried the more progressive candidate to victory in one, and in another he carried a more moderate candidate. I’d argue the first was his biggest mistake because Gianoulis is craptacular candidate. In the other case, many progressive would argue that he’s wrong because they supported Cegelis and he backed Duckworth. While it’s fine to be upset with him over that, it doesn’t necessarily make him less progressive. Several progressive organizations also took that route including SEIU, IFT, and Citizen Action endorsed Tammy as well. Are they not progressive or liberal?
In the out of state case, where Senators are traditionally very careful about crossing into an election in another state, he’s supporting Lieberman as is Durbin. I disagree with him, but so what–he’s with me on a whole host of issues.
When it comes down to central issues such as voting rights, he’s the guy who has most loudly complained about Voter ID bills that will disenfranchise many by being an effective poll tax. He took a lead on immigration reform. While many Democrats have tried to straddle the issue, he’s taken strong, clear positions.
Picking out a couple votes or actions that one might not agree with doesn’t make someone not progressive/liberal no matter how mad one is or how big of a grudge Matt Stoller has on the guy.
Judy’s Granny Shorts need to go.
For nearly a year before the March 2004 primary I was ranking the contenders for the Democratic nomination to the Illinois US Senate seat in some fashion and it wasn’t until late January that anyone besides Dan Hynes was ever considered anything, but the frontrunner.
Matt Stoller brought this up in terms of Barack’s supposed caution.
One thing to consider is that Obama walked into the Senate. His primary opponent and his general election opponent both self-destructed. In some small way, he thinks of himself as a fraud who snuck into the Senate, undeserving of the attention he gets on a regular basis. He’s never had to make that call to pull the trigger on the negative ads. He’s never weathered the scandals. He’s never been won an actual media intensive campaign.
He beat the fucking machine people. I like Dan Hynes–I like Barack more. But Dan Hynes didn’t self destruct in the primary, he got beat by SEIU, Barack’s talent, and a hell of a media campaign by Axelrod.
Blair Hull had only registered significant support for the last couple months of the campaign and it was largely based upon heavy advertising. Hull ran a decent campaign and barring problems might have made the race closer.
He got 53% of the vote in a 7 way race with five serious candidates. He beat the machine candidate, Hynes, by over 2-1. Hynes won his last statewide election with 60 some % of the vote and had nearly every, if not every county chairman supporting him. Hull ended with 11% of the vote. If Hull had gotten 31% of the vote, Obama presumably would have lost 20 points and been at 33% of the vote.
Obama ran a remarkable insurgent campaign and this meme that he has never been tested is bullshit.
And while certainly anyone would have been a stronger opponent than Keyes, Jack Ryan wasn’t all that impressive of a candidate. In the Republican primary, he got a total of 228,000 votes to over 642,000 votes for Barack. The chief challenge in Illinois is the Democratic Party Primary and Barack ran a remarkable campaign.
Michael Madigan is a regular whipping boy for progressives, but he also illustrates important points about how to win and pass progressive policies.
Madigan doesn’t run large, loud campaigns to win as many seats as he can. He runs campaigns that keeps Democrats in the Majority and insulates them as much as possible from waves by localizing elections. That means not every District gets a strong challenger, but it does mean that other than 1994 the Illinois House has been Democratic since before I started voting.
Madigan is very much an institutionalist that people like to deride, but the reason for that is if you control the institution, you control the outcomes. When he was dealing with Republican Governors and/or Republican Governor it meant he could fund the programs he felt necessary and stop raids on social services where needed. But when freed of Pate Philip and a Republican Governor, we’ve seen a great deal of progressive legislation pass. Nathan Newman pointed out the success this winter.
I often make fun of Madigan for speaking rarely and smiling perhaps even less. But that’s the point, yelling loudly about policy isn’t governing. Sometimes you have to crash the gate. Other times, you just need to get to work. Many progressives claim to be more progressive than thou by how loudly the promote themselves instead of what they accomplished. I’ll take Mike Madigan over them anyday.
But fix the fricken web site people.
BP did a great job addressing the Obama piece by David Sirota in the Nation
Specifically, the attack on Obama’s vote on a class action bill. The bill moved more class action claims into federal court instead of state courts. Trial lawyers were against this because federal judges tend to reign in such cases far more than state judges and ultimately it will probably lower the judgments.
The problem here is that it is a basic Constitutional problem. Most class action suits are about interstate commerce and as such belong in the one venue that is neutral to the parties. Madison County is an example where local judges are more likely to be influenced by local lawyers who are active locally while the company is often out of state or at least out of area. While I like to bash irresponsible corporations, as a basic matter of a good judicial system this bill made sense and it’s a case where Obama used good sense to think about how the problem should be dealt with. If we need to change the rules to make them more fair, than we can do that by passing other laws.
That’s a substantive problem I have with the piece, but more to the point, one of the great progressive victories of this century was obtained by a progressive who was initially a flame thrower.
One of the single best books on the Senate and separately on Civil Rights is The Walls of Jericho and it follows the path to Civil Rights with Hubert Humprhey’s election on through the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Humphrey came to the Senate and made speeches and lectured his colleagues and was quickly shut out of power. He started to make progress only as he became an institutionalist and learned to pull the institution with him through the rules of the Senate and he gained valuable allies including Lyndon Johnson.
To attempt to paint someone who is an institutionalist as less progressive ignores the institution and how it works. It is ahistorical.
If anything, Obama has been wise in respecting the institution and in doing so has been able to forge working alliances on critical progressive issues including contracting (with of all people-Coburn), he’s been working very hard against the creep of Voter ID bills that will likely disenchise millions if carried out across the nation, he’s been one of the strongest voices on Darfur (again with the bizarre pairing of Brownback), working toward nuclear weapons security, and despite Sirota’s dismissive mention of Veteran’s care, VA reform.
The difference drawn between Obama’s caution and Wellstone demonstrate an important difference. Wellstone blocked legislation—a vital thing to do sometimes. Obama is trying to legislate. Wellstone did too, but in many ways he was his best playing defense. But that is also a deeply institutional role in the US Senate where Wellstone had to use parliamentary tactics to delay the bankruptcy bill and thus often burning his capital with others. Personally, I think the two roles are complimentary.
The larger point is being progressive in the United States Senate is being an institutionalist. Humphrey learned it, Wellstone knew it, and Obama gets it.
These are all essential progressive issues that in some cases have support from some Republicans. It’s more than a little annoying to hear that VA Reform is mundane when we are in the middle of a war where we are producing more injured individuals in proportion to previous wars. The injured soldiers are most frequently working class kids who are often going to need care for the rest of their lives. Those already in the system, have been made a promise by this country and while it might seem mundane, it actually affects the daily lives of people who Democrats are supposed to care about.
The Bush Administration attack on the VA should be truly scandalous. Jim Nicholson is one of the worst examples of the hackocracy in this administration. He’s has taken a system that throughout the 1990s was turned into a reliable and trustworthy institution for veterans and sent it careening towards it’s inglorious past of being underfunded and undercaring.
If Obama could make an issue just plop on the national stage and get widespread attention, you’d think this would be it, but the press largely deals with it in small stories that do not address the systematic underfunding to help shift that money to Congress’ whims.
Energy development is a small thing? While I have signficant problems with the coal and ethanol initiatives he has pushed, it would seem to me that those are issues that working people count on every day.
The notion that carrots are liberal and sticks are progressive get to the root of the problem. Why are carrots liberal and sticks progressive? It’s just a claim with no support. Progressives might mistrust runaway corporate power, but why does the strategy matter as long as the results get there?
I guess what bothers me is that as Sirota has reinvented himself as the state policy guy, he’s ignoring one of the progressive victories in the states and it’s germane to this story.
Illinois has passed a pretty impressive series of progressive bills in the last few years. We certainly have unmet needs in the education area, but workers rights have been greatly improved and environmental protection (if not always conservations) is much better. More in the next post…
Apparently John, Illinois Dem Net and I are full of liberal hate.
An odd trio to choose, but hey, Fritchey Unhinged can be the new title.
ArchPundit