Reposted from my blog at
Three Guys.
My girlfriend and I saw Senate candidate Erskine Bowles at Greensboro's own Tate St. Coffee tonight. The man is pumped up. He's actually quite charming; my girlfriend keeps telling people how nice he seemed. And I thought he was hilarious. He kept referring to his mother at a table near the front, and how we should know he was telling the truth because she'd whup him if he didn't. I believed it.
Bowles is a very issue-oriented candidate. He just jumped in, promising to insure every child in America, to protect the spouses of National Guard members sent overseas, to protect the jobs America has and to wisely invest in creating more.
The moment that most hit me, however, was his wife's impassioned plea for a revisiting of the stem cell issue. The Bowleses have two sons with diabetes, and two elderly relatives who died of ALS; these are people who know what it costs us to protect the right to life of a frozen embyro in a test tube.
The stem cell decision came right before the world changed and everything went crazy. Here's
what I wrote about it at the time. I'm still angry about it. And I think one of the first actions of the Kerry administration will be to reverse this regressive and pointless crackdown on life-saving, critical research.
But I disgress.
Erskine's gonna win, and he's gonna be great in the Senate. Hearing him speak, I'm surprised to find myself more excited to volunteer for his campaign than I was before. I was afraid he'd sound like a panderer, talking about common sense (as a code word for tax and spending cuts) and "North Carolina values." As a transplanted Yankee, those values aren't all mine.
But when Erskine talks about common sense, it isn't code. He's talking about restoring rationality to the process, fixing what is in many ways a broken system paralyzed by partisanship and ideological fundamentalism (on both sides). Today, he emphasized what this country really needs: health care reform, job security, and responsible Democratic leadership willing to compromise with, but not capitulate to, the other side.
Finally cracked and put a Bowles bumper sticker on my car. Living in the South as I now do, I was a little afraid to risk it. All I can say is, I better not get keyed.
Go Erskine!