I'm getting censored, silenced, cut off. It's happening all over the place, in local weeklies and at speaking venues. And it's wrong. Even if I supported the incumbent in a race like this, I would condemn the way things are going. You can't have a democracy without a free and open debate. But like the rest of the Bush/Delay GOP, John McHugh can't stand up to a real debate.
It was subtle at first, maybe could be shrugged off. But then last week, two events happened on the same day, one directly caused the Republicans, another a silencing of debate in the press, that illustrate perfectly what's happening, and what always seems to happen when Bush/Cheney Republicans are in positions of political power.
Join me below the flip to see what the silencing of democracy looks like on a local level ...
In
my diary last week, I talked about what I saw as the intimidation of a whistle-blower by Donald Rumsfeld. The reason these kinds of stories are so important is because they're part of an overall dismissal of the democratic conversation by the party in power. If you can intimidate whistle-blowers from telling people what's really happening, well, then you don't have to defend anything. .
No, you don't have to depend upon a Supreme Court to vote along party lines and appoint a President, or prevent voters from getting to the polls by not having enough voting machines in precincts that are favorable to your opponent, or design districts in the middle of a census cycle that will assure your opponents being voted out. No, you don't have to be that blatant. Just gag your opponent. Prevent the electorate from being informed. But didn't we object to that in the former Soviet Block and Castro's Cuba? Real democracy can be inconvenient for those desperate to hold on the power.
But, literally while I was writing that diary about intimidation, I was learning about intimidation in my own district. I was hearing about the shutdown of the democratic conversation in my own race. If you've never seen the suppression of democracy up close, it's a pretty remarkable thing.
Last week, I showed up at an event for seniors in my district. It's a large event, and I've spoken at this event both of the previous two years (I've been running hard and long on this race, guys). The Medicare Part D debacle was the reason I decided I needed to run in the first place, and I was excited to make my case again, right before the election season.
I arrived at the event and was told of a last minute change: only incumbents would be allowed to speak. I was flabbergasted. Why would the organizers change it? I spoke to one of them. He was very apologetic and told me the truth: they had a meeting that was unexpectedly flooded with Republicans, who forced a vote on this format. The main race affected was ... mine. This was a John McHugh special. Rather than face the music on Medicare, rather than even let the people hear an opposing viewpoint, he'd rather shut me down.
The hell with it, I thought. I went table-to-table anyway. Got to talk to a lot more people one-on-one. He can't beat me that easily.
But this kind of thing has been happening with ever-increasing frequency. And a more serious problem has been in the media. Mine is a rural district, filled with small weeklies and a couple of larger papers. Unfortunately, many of those papers, including the largest, are owned by one family, the Johnsons (not related, as will be obvious). They are, to put it mildly, conservative. Think the Loebs in Manchester, NH. They are with McHugh lock, stock, and barrel and repeat his talking points the few times they mention the race at all.
And we've heard rumors of pressure being applied to other media outlets as well.
But then the reach extended further. Last week, on the very day I was shut out from the senior event by Republican operatives, the weeklies of the EAGLE group in a series of small towns announced a new policy, effective for this election season: there will be no more political op-eds by any political candidate. None. Debate on the issues, it seems, is not what today's newspapers need to concern themselves with.
The publisher of those weeklies is known as a staunch Republican. In a race pitting an incumbent with high name-ID but a record that's unknown to his district against a challenger intent on exposing that record ... well, who's looking to squelch debate? And the EAGLE weeklies have actually been fairly good up to now, with a decent mix of editorials from a variety of perspectives. So why the change all of a sudden?
The timing of the announcement, just after we sent off two hard-hitting pieces nailing McHugh, just as we go on the air with our first ad and coming on the same day of a demonstrable effort by Republicans to shut me off, is concerning to say the least.
But even without attaching partisan motivations to that one action, how can we have an effective democracy with a civic culture that shuts out debate? I'd be against what's going on if FDR were the incumbent. Shutting out conversation, denying the people the chance to hear a debate on the issues ... it's not what democracy is all about.
We're trying to run a people-powered campaign, grass-roots activism amplifying our message of hope, change and accountability, but the incumbent doesn't want a debate. He's raised the money to flood the airwaves with ads, raising all of it outside of the district in places like Washington DC, Virginia Beach, Virginia and West Palm Beach, California. He wants this to be a complete air war, a campaign of 30-second ads where he can hide his far-right agenda from our purple district and coast on his name ID. Without a real debate, without a free and flowing dialogue, our democracy simply cannot function. You get people who think Saddam was behind 9/11, and George W. Bush is something other than an ill-informed incompetent.
McHugh's machine is going all out to silence me in the district for a reason; his support is thin and evaporates as soon as I tell people his record: voting with Tom Delay more than 91% of the time, backing the President on literally every vote that matters, voting against stem-cell research, allowing our tax dollars to be stolen by corrupt contractors in Iraq with no oversight from the Armed Services Committee on which he sits ... on and on in a conservative, heartless agenda out of step with his district. (Even with McHugh running essentially unopposed, my district has averaged about 49% for Democrats for federal office over the last 6 years ... more if you go back to include Bill Clinton's big victory in the district).
But you can help. One good thing about our district: it's extraordinarily cheap to run ads. Even $20 can buy an ad on cable around the Daily Show or at any time on CNN. A couple hundred bucks can buy ad time around the 6 o'clock news on a station with the largest news market share in the country. And we have a producer in-house (dKos's own BriVT, btw); we don't have to pay for the production. So your contribution can make a real difference. Every one of you who can contribute will pay for an ad where we can expose our Congressman for what he really is and show the people of our district what a true Democratic message is like (maybe we should record "I'm [Kos user-name] and I approved this message" for each of you). Together we can break this embargo of democracy that's going on here.
And I encourage ALL of you to read the people-powered diary I linked to earlier and volunteer for our innovative effort. I'm looking forward to burying McHugh on the air (we have a classic in the pipeline), but my real desire is to win this race with a real grass-roots/net-roots effort that can show a way for other candidates to do the same.
Contribute. Volunteer, no matter where you live. We can win this thing, and start the return to a true, functioning democracy in this country.
{I'm Bob Johnson (no, not the long-time Kossack regular "Bob Johnson") and I'm running for Congress in NY-23}
update: mollyd left a suggestion for an outdoor rally ... it's a great idea. We're already planning an number of those. Viggo Mortensen (Lord of the Rings, History of Violence, Hildago) is campaigning with us Sept 7,8,&9. Change the Course of a Nation
There are a lot of smart, savvy people on this blog, so if you have other ideas on how to generate our own news, I'm sure we'll get plenty of ideas we haven't thought of, yet. So ... fire away with suggestions ...