I was up writing today before 6 and by 7 I was on the phone with an incredible American, Jay Fawcett, who is running for Congress in Colorado, in the home district of the odious James Dobson. Jay isn't a politician. He's a pragmatic everyday American-- although we should all be as brilliant as he is-- who retired from the Air Force, after 20 years of service, as a Lt. Colonel in 1998. A couple weeks ago I interviewed
Dr. Victoria Wulsin, a public health policy expert running in OH-02 against Mean Jean Schmidt and I was as blown away by her as I was by Jay. But this diary is neither about Victoria nor Jay. It's about Jerry McNerney. But there are several things that these 3 candidates have in common that I want to talk about.
None are politicians. All are experts. All are outside the box, analytic thinkers. If you want a solution to a matter of military policy you go to someone, like Jay Fawcett or like Wes Clark, who has used his brilliant mind sorting it out for decades. You don't go to grubby, slimy political hacks like George Bush, Dick Cheney or Karl Rove who have only thought of the military as something to be avoided and then as something to help enrich themselves and their cronies. If you want to start a discussion about reforming our broken health care system, you turn to a real expert like Vic Wulsin, who led the effort to rebuild Rwanda's health care system, not to someone like Bill Frist who has pushed through "health care" legislation designed primarily to enrich his family (whose medical businesses have made them billionaires-- with a "b"-- since the highly unscrupulous Frist became Bush's chief rubber stamp in the Senate).
And that brings us to Jerry McNerney. If you live in California, there's a good chance you've seen either of the giant wind farms outside of L.A. (near Palm Springs) or San Francisco (near Livermore). Jerry worked on both. A brilliant mathematician, he has become one of the country's recognized experts in wind energy technology. If you want a rational and sustainable energy policy for America's future, do you go to greedy, avaricious oil companies and to their paid harlots-- like McNerney's crooked opponent in CA-11, Dirty Dick Pombo-- or do you go to someone who recognizes the importance of being proactive and coming up with real life solutions?
Congress has been in the hands of corrupt political hacks eager to feather their own nests for too long now. America can't afford it anymore. McNerney, like Wulsin and Fawcett, wants to go to Congress to take on real problems and help solve them. But these three have something else in common and that is the reason I'm writing today.
None of these Democratic challengers are being supported by the DCCC. McNerney and Wulsin are running against two of the worst incumbents in the entire United States Congress. No Democrat, not even an honest Inside the Beltway one-- if you could find one-- would challenge that. And Fawcett's opponent is even further over the cliff of right wing extremism than Mean Jean Schmidt or Dirty Dick Pombo! These are three well-qualified challengers to 3 egregiously horrible Republicans. So where's the DCCC? Polling in Wulsin's district shows a dead heat. Polling in McNerney's district shows McNerney actually out-polling Pombo! So where's the DCCC?
These three candidates, and many other grassroots, anti-war, anti-corporate agenda, independent-minded Democrats have been abandoned by the Insider-oriented DCCC. If they're going to get elected, they're going to get elected because of grassroots and netroots efforts. Jay Fawcett and Jerry McNerney are Kos Netroots candidates; Jerry McNerney and Victoria Wulsin (next week Jay too) are Blue America candidates.
Last week Blue America had a live blogging session with Vic Wulsin and you might want to check out the archive. Next week, September 2, Jay Fawcett and Bill Winter, another solid Fightin' Dem running for a House seat in Colorado (Tancredo's), will be Blue America guests. But tomorrow is Jerry McNerney Day at Firedoglake's Blue America series. Jerry will be joining us for a two hour live blogging session at 11 AM (West Coast time). Feel free to come along and ask Jerry whatever you'd like and see for yourself the difference between a Dirty Dick Pombo and an actual people's candidate.