This is my very first DKos diary, so please be gentle. There's only one first time...
Here's some good news from the dark recesses of the Beltway Village. One of their house organs finally got it right:
BLOGGERS VS BELTWAY: The New Whips?
In an effort to help Congressional Dems pass SCHIP, the netroots are stepping up pressure on the five House Dem who voted with GOPers against extending the program. Fire Dog Lake's Jane Hamsher blogs: "Since the passage of the S-CHIP bill, the DCCC has been running a campaign of phone calls and radio ads to pressure Republicans who voted against it into switching their vote and overturning Bush's veto. ... But what about the five Democrats who voted against it, and still refuse to switch their vote? ... this morning Blue America is joining with BlogPac to do the same thing by placing recorded calls in the districts of the five Democrats: Jim Marshall (GA), Baron Hill (IN), Gene Taylor (MS), Bob Etheridge (NC), and Mike McIntyre (NC)."
Open Left's Chris Bowers notes that the five have already been labeled 'Bush Dogs' and promises: "If primary challenges were to appear against any of these Democrats, I would support them."
Needless to say, you Kossacks know how to whip it good as well as anyone, which is why I've ventured into these hallowed diaries to tell you a little bit more about what we are doing and ask for your support.
It's hard to believe that any Democrat would vote against health care for kids, but there those five were, standing with the most unpopular president in modern memory (maybe ever) whose own caucus is beside itself at having to vote against a program that everyone agrees is necessary and politically popular.
Readers here at Daily Kos and across the Netroots were appalled. We expect this kind of cruel behavior from Republicans. And we have been harshly schooled in the facts of life in the Big tent Democratic Party. But on this issue, uninsured kids, we don't think it's too much to ask that Democrats act like Democrats. Even Orrin Hatch voted for it, for crying out loud.
So we mobilized a telephone campaign into their districts, featuring a working mom with two kids from North Carolina(whose name I'm not going to mention for reasons which I'm sure are obvious after the events of this week)asking their constituents to tell these alleged Democrats to vote to override President Bush's veto. And lo and behold, the North Carolina reps are now saying they've moved to "undecided" and Baron Hill in Indiana has switched his vote. (In the last example, we don't know if it was the calls or the newspaper ad we were set to run in his district this week-end, but something made him realize he needed to do the right thing.)
So we are going to keep whipping it good and see if we can at least persuade the rest of these Bush Dogsto be Democrats. We are going to run a newspaper ad next week in the district of Georgia Democrat Jim Marshall, the fellow who stood before the state legislature and said that Washington was coming up with:
"...all kinds of initiatives to expand the State Childrens Health Insurance Program and I think Georgia needs to be in sync with that. It's not the fault of the kid that the kid doesn't have health insurance. It's penny wise and pound foolish for us to be short on this program. This program saves us dollars in the long run and does a lot of good for kids. It's a great program. That's why it has bipartisan support in congress."
That was last spring. Today, Jim Marshall seems to think that "bipartisan" means voting against 220 Democrats and 45 Republicans to sustain a presidential veto that will be handily overridden in the Senate by such left wing hippies as Dick Lugar and Charles Grassley. Why even Joe Lieberman is on board with this one!
Jim Marshall should be careful. The Atlanta Journal Constitution wrote the Blue American/Blogpac telephone campaign up yesterday and offered some sobering news for the congressman. His constituents are unhappy:
Martin Matheny, of the Georgia Democratic Party, declined to comment on how the phone-in campaign against Marshall could play out in the 2008 election, but acknowledged that many state Democrats are unhappy with the three-term congressman.
"If you look around the blogs in Georgia, there are some Democrats upset with him about this," Matheny said.
Marshall's positions on SCHIP and the Iraq war, among other things, earned him at least two Democratic primary challengers. Macon Mayor Jack Ellis last week formed an exploratory committee to challenge Marshall. Robert Nowak, a schoolteacher from Macon, this week joined the primary race.
[...]
Activists involved in the override battle likened the current campaigns to similar ones run against Bush's Social Security reform measures in 2005. Bush's proposal, the centerpiece of his second-term agenda, was defeated.
"This is the biggest fight we have had on a domestic issue since the showdown with President Bush's plan to privatize Social Security," said Chuck Loveless, legislative director of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the country's largest public workers union. "The president essentially has told American kids to drop dead, and we're quite simply not going to let that happen."
No we are not, at least not without a fight. We in the netroots aren't afraid to take on Bush Dogs who refuse to defy their loathed and despised lord and master even to fund health care for sick children. It's time to let Democrats like Jim Marshall know that there are some issues which truly are non-negotiable for Democrats.
Hell, they're non-negotiable for human beings.
If you would like to help Blue America and Blogpac send Jim Marshall a message, you can donate to this ActBlue page. If you click the link, you'll see the ad we plan to place in his local paper. It should get a reaction.
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